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 THE COLLECTED ESSAYS ^ ADDRESSES 
 
 OF THE 
 
 Rt. Hon. AUGUSTINE BIRRELL
 
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 THE COLLECTED 
 ESSAYS ^ ADDRESSES 
 
 OF THE Rt. Hon. 
 
 AUGUSTINE BIRRELL 
 
 1880-1920 
 
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 VOL. ONE 
 
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 PREFACE 
 
 I OWN to having been not a little surprised 
 when my old friend Mr. Dent (whose first 
 publication, The Essays of Elia, I edited many 
 years ago) expressed a desire to produce a collected 
 c^ edition of my essays — " if my poor ramblings 
 ^ amount to that appellation." 
 
 I had lately brought myself to believe that my 
 
 race as an essayist was run, and remembering that 
 
 it had begun more than thirty-eight years ago, my 
 
 °° vanity was not in the least wounded by that 
 
 "" sombre reflection. 
 
 ^=1^ During this prolonged period I have enjoyed 
 
 (for an essayist of my calibre) a considerable 
 
 circulation, both at home and in the United States, 
 
 where from the first Messrs. Scribners had done 
 
 their honest best for me even in the old unprotected 
 
 . days ; and as a book-hunter from boyhood I knew 
 
 '^ that in due time the purchased volumes would find 
 
 their way to the stall and the " second-hand" 
 
 pjj catalogue, and so be bandied about from one 
 
 ^ owner to another for an indefinite period of time. 
 
 ^ And yet for all that, Mr. Dent's unlooked-for 
 
 f^^^y •.71 

 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 proposal gave me pleasure, for circulation is an 
 author's life, and the more volumes there are in 
 the world with his name upon their title-pages 
 the better is his chance of living, for the more 
 frequent will be the appearance and reappearance 
 of his books on the stall and in the catalogue. 
 
 I became an author quite by accident. I had 
 never dreamt of such a thing. Some time in 1883, 
 whilst pursuing in Lincoln's Inn, after a dimmish 
 but not wholly unremunerative fashion, the now 
 decayed profession of an equity draftsman and 
 conveyancer, it occurred to me that it would be 
 a cheap amusement could I persuade two old 
 schoolfellows who had, I knew, like myself, some 
 manuscripts which had been read aloud in friendly 
 coteries, to club together and print for private 
 circulation one hundred copies of our selected 
 lucubrations. I failed to excite their interest in 
 this enterprise save so far that George Radford, 
 afterwards Sir George Radford, a London County 
 Councillor and a Member of Parliament and from 
 very early days a dear friend of my own, produced 
 a paper entitled "Falstaff" and handed it over to 
 me, telling me that I might do what I listed with 
 it. With this notable exception I was thrown upon 
 my own resources. 
 
 When the little packet was made up, I sent it
 
 PREFACE vii 
 
 to Mr. Elliot Stock and asked for an estimate of 
 the cost of printing one hundred copies. His 
 reply took the form of sending me two estimates, 
 one for a hundred copies, the other for two hundred 
 and fifty, and at the same time he pointed out to 
 me that as the difference in cost was insignificant 
 I might as well "have a little fun for my money" 
 and let him print the larger number — and send 
 twenty-five to the newspapers. 
 
 As the book was to be anonymous I had no 
 need to think about my clients, and so it came 
 about that at the beginning of the long vacation 
 of 1884 the first series of Obiter Dicta made its 
 appearance. 
 
 Then the unexpected happened. In 1884 I had 
 never "reviewed" a book, or indeed written a line 
 in either the daily or the weekly press, and I could 
 not, therefore, have known that Obiter Dicta was 
 a book very easy to review, touching as it did, 
 lightly enough, on a variety of familiar topics, 
 and composed in a style not yet grown jaded. 
 
 However that may be, "reviewed" Obiter Dicta 
 was, and at once, in nearly all the papers and with 
 a prodigality of praise. The Times was more than 
 friendly, the Spectator bestowed upon it at least 
 two "serious" notices, the St. Jameses Gazette had 
 something to say about the paper on "Actors,"
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 and so had the JForld. The "Falstaff" excited 
 genuine admiration. Headmasters of pubHc schools 
 quoted Obiter Dicta in their sermons in the school 
 chapel, and, as Jowett's Life subsequently revealed, 
 it was read with pleasure in the master's lodge 
 at Balliol, and attributed to a single lady living 
 at Clifton! 
 
 I was (to tell the truth) greatly taken aback by 
 this small triumph, but nevertheless the reviews 
 sealed my fate as an author, for from that day 
 forward I have pursued, as an avocation, the 
 pleasant path of periodical publication. 
 
 There must, however, be an end of such things, 
 and I am glad to be able to part company with 
 these essays, and to dismiss them finally; not 
 indeed with "frigid indifference," for that would 
 be too lofty a frame of mind for me ever to 
 assume, but with this prefatory puff, gentle 
 as is the breath with which a child disperses a 
 dandelion-clock. 
 
 I have reprinted the essays (blunders excepted) 
 exactly as they were first published, but have 
 rearranged them in the hope of being able to 
 impart to them at least an air of consecutiveness. 
 I have, however, taken pains to add to each essay 
 the year in which it first appeared; for dates are 
 both explanatory and excusatory things. My
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 essays need little explanation, but occasionally 
 they may require excuse. 
 
 I should perhaps make a formal excuse for in- 
 cluding in a collected edition of my essays George 
 Radford's "Falstaff," but I cannot bring myself 
 to part company with it. Many of my oldest 
 friends have often told me that they like it better 
 than the others, and whether I have agreed with 
 them or not I have always found it pleasanter to 
 read than any of my own. Lady Radford has 
 given me her permission so to include it. 
 
 AUGUSTINE BIRRELL. 
 
 The Pightle, Sheringham, 
 October 1922. 
 
 Note. — The few papers to which an asterisk is 
 attached have never before been collected. The 
 Rectorial Address was published at the time by 
 Mr. Humphreys of "Hatchards','' and the Address 
 on John Bright by Mr. Fisher Unwin.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 John Milton 
 
 
 . , 
 
 
 I 
 
 Roger North's Autobiography . 
 
 * « 
 
 
 35 
 
 Pope 
 
 • 
 
 
 42 
 
 Lord Bolingbroke 
 
 
 • 
 
 
 80 
 
 Dean Swift 
 
 
 * 
 
 
 86 
 
 * " Gulliver's Travels " , 
 
 
 • 
 
 
 94 
 
 John Gay . 
 
 
 • 
 
 
 100 
 
 Sir John Vanbrugh . 
 
 
 • 
 
 
 107 
 
 Dr. Johnson 
 
 
 • 
 
 
 • 113 
 
 The Gospel according to . 
 
 Dr. J 
 
 OHNSON 
 
 
 . 139 
 
 The Johnsonian Legend 
 
 
 • 
 
 
   143 
 
 BoswELL AS Biographer 
 
 
 • 
 
 
 . 150 
 
 Edmund Burke . 
 
 
 » • 
 
 
 • 15s 
 
 Sterne 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 . 184 
 
 Lord Chesterfield . 
 
 
 » • 
 
 
 . 189 
 
 Samuel Richardson . 
 
 
 • 
 
 
 . 196 
 
 Edward Gibbon 
 
 
 • * 
 
 
 . 221 
 
 William Cowper 
 
 
   • 
 
 
 . 251 
 
 Richard Cumberland 
 
 
 • • 
 
 
 . 272 
 
 Hannah More . 
 
 
 • • 
 
 
 . 278 
 
 Arthur Young . 
 
 
 • • 
 
 
 . 284 
 
 Thomas Paine . 
 
 
 • • 
 
 
 292 
 
 / 
 
 XI
 
 xii CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 John Wesley ....... 301 
 
 Sir Robert Peel ...... 326 
 
 *The Private Letters of Sir Robert Peel . 349 
 
 * John Bright ....... 355 
 
 * Cobden ........ 373 
 
 Disraeli " ex relatione " Sir William Eraser . 382 
 
 * Gladstone ....... 389
 
 JOHN MILTON 
 
 1887 
 
 IT is now more than sixty years ago since 
 Mr. Carlyle took occasion to observe, in his 
 Life of Schiller, that, except the Newgate 
 Calendar, there was no more sickening reading 
 than the biographies of authors. 
 
 Allowing for the vivacity of the comparison, and 
 only remarking, with reference to the Newgate 
 Calendar, that its compilers have usually been 
 very inferior wits, in fact attorneys, it must be 
 owned that great creative and inventive genius, 
 the most brilhant gifts of bright fancy and happy 
 expression, and a glorious imagination, well-nigh 
 seeming as if it must be inspired, have too often 
 been found most unsuitably lodged in ill-living 
 and scandalous mortals. Though few things, even 
 in what is called Literature, are more disgusting 
 than to hear small critics, who earn their bite and 
 sup by acting as the self-appointed showmen of 
 the works of their betters, heaping terms of moral 
 opprobrium upon those whose genius is, if not 
 exactly a lamp unto our feet, at all events a joy 
 to our hearts, — still, not even genius can repeal 
 the Decalogue, or re-write the sentence of doom, 
 " He which is filthy, let him be filthy still." It 
 is therefore permissible to wish that some of our 
 great authors had been better men.
 
 2 JOHN MILTON 
 
 It is possible to dislike John Milton. Men have 
 been found able to do so, and women too; amongst 
 these latter his daughters, or one of them at least, 
 must even be included. But there is nothing sicken- 
 ing about his biography, for it is the life of one 
 who early consecrated himself to the service of 
 the highest Muses, who took labour and intent 
 study as his portion, who aspired himself to be a 
 noble poem, who, Republican though he became, 
 is what Carlyle called him, the moral king of 
 English literature. 
 
 Milton was born in Bread Street, Cheapside, 
 on the 9th of December, 1608. This is most satis- 
 factory, though indeed what might have been 
 expected. There is a notable disposition nowadays, 
 amongst the meaner-minded provincials, to carp 
 and gird at the claims of London to be considered 
 the mother-city of the Anglo-Saxon race, to regret 
 her pre-eminence, and sneer at her fame. In the 
 matters of municipal government, gas, water, fog, 
 and snow, much can be alleged and proved against 
 the English capital, but in the domain of poetry, 
 which I take to be a nation's best guaranteed 
 stock, it may safely be said that there are but two 
 shrines in England whither it is necessary for the 
 literary pilgrim to carry his cockle hat and shoon 
 — London, the birthplace of Chaucer, Spenser, Ben 
 Jonson, Milton, Herrick, Pope, Gray, Blake, Keats, 
 and Browning, and Stratford-upon-Avon, the birth- 
 place of Shakespeare. Of English poets it may be 
 said generally they are either born in London or 
 remote country places. The large provincial towns 
 know them not. Indeed, nothing is more pathetic 
 than the way in which these dim, destitute places
 
 JOHN MILTON 3 
 
 hug the memory of any puny whipster of a poet 
 who may have been born within their statutory 
 boundaries. This has its advantages, for it keeps 
 ahve in certain locahties fames that would other- 
 wise have utterly perished. Parnassus has for- 
 gotten all about Henry Kirke White, but the lace 
 manufacturers of Nottingham still name him with 
 whatever degree of reverence they may respectively 
 consider to be the due of letters. Manchester is 
 yet mindful of Dr. John Byrom. Liverpool clings 
 to Roscoe, and faintly remembers Mrs. Hcmans. 
 
 Milton remained faithful to his birth-city, though, 
 like many another Londoner, when he was perse- 
 cuted in one house he fled into another. From 
 Bread Street he moved to St. Bride's Churchyard, 
 Fleet Street; from Fleet Street to Aldersgate 
 Street; from Aldersgate Street to the Barbican; 
 from the Barbican to the south side of Holborn; 
 from the south side of Holborn to what is now 
 called York Street, Westminster; from York 
 Street, Westminster, to the north side of Holborn; 
 from the north side of Holborn to Jewin Street; 
 from Jewin Street to his last abode in Bunhill 
 Fields. These are not vain repetitions if they 
 serve to remind a single reader how all the en- 
 chantments of association lie about him. English- 
 women have been found searching about Florence 
 for the street where George Eliot represents Romola 
 as having lived, who have admitted never having 
 been to Jewin Street, where the author of Lycidas 
 and Paradise Lost did in fact live. 
 
 Milton's father was the right kind of father, 
 amiable, accomplished, and well-to-do. He was by 
 business what was then called a scrivener, a term
 
 4 JOHN MILTON 
 
 which has received judicial interpretation, and im- 
 ported a person who arranged loans on mortgage, 
 receiving a commission for so doing. The poet's 
 mother, whose baptismal name was Sarah (his 
 father was, like himself, John), was a lady of good 
 extraction, and approved excellence and virtue. 
 We do not know very much about her, for the 
 poet was one of those rare men of genius who are 
 prepared to do justice to their fathers. Though 
 Sarah Milton did not die till 1637, she only knew 
 her son as the author of Comus, though it is surely 
 a duty to beheve that no son would have poems 
 like V Allegro and // Penseroso in his desk, and not 
 at least once produce them and read them aloud to 
 his mother. These poems, though not pubHshed 
 till 1645, were certainly composed in his mother's 
 life. She died before the troubles began, the strife 
 and contention in which her well-graced son, the 
 poet, the dreamer of all things beautiful and cul- 
 tured, the author of the glancing, tripping measure — 
 
 Haste thee, nymph, and bring with thee 
 Jest and youthful jolHty — 
 
 was destined to take a part, so eager and so fierce, 
 
 and for which he was to sacrifice twenty years of 
 
 a poet's life. 
 
 The poet was sent to St. Paul's School, where he 
 
 had excellent teaching of a humane and expanding 
 
 character, and he early became, what he remained 
 
 until his sight left him, a strenuous reader and a 
 
 late student. 
 
 Or let my lamp at midnight hour 
 Be^seen on some high, lonely tower. 
 Where I may oft outwatch the Bear. 
 
 Whether the maid who was told off by the elder
 
 JOHN MILTON 5 
 
 Milton to sit up till twelve or one o'clock in the 
 morning for this wonderful Pauline realised that 
 she was a kind of doorkeeper in the house of genius, 
 and blessed accordingly, is not known, and may 
 be doubted. When sixteen years old Milton pro- 
 ceeded to Christ's College, Cambridge, where his 
 memory is still cherished; and a mulberry tree, 
 supposed in some way to be his, rather unkindly 
 kept alive. Milton was not a submissive pupil; in 
 fact, he was never a submissive anything, for there 
 is point in Dr. Johnson's malicious remark, that 
 man in Milton's opinion was born to be a rebel, 
 and woman a slave. 
 
 But in most cases, at all events, the rebel did 
 well to be rebellious, and perhaps he was never 
 so entirely in the right as when he protested 
 against the slavish traditions of Cambridge educa- 
 tional methods in 1625. 
 
 Universities must, however, at all times prove 
 disappointing places to the young and ingenuous 
 soul, who goes up to them eager for literature, 
 seeing in every don a devotee to intellectual beauty, 
 and hoping that lectures will, by some occult 
 process — the genius loci — initiate him into the 
 mysteries of taste and the storehouses of culture. 
 And then the improving conversation, the flashing 
 wit, the friction of mind with mind, — these are 
 looked for, but hardly found; and the young 
 scholar groans in spirit, and perhaps does as Milton 
 did — quarrels with his tutor. But if he is wise he 
 will, as Milton also did, make it up again, and get 
 the most that he can from his stony-hearted step- 
 mother before the time comes for him to bid her 
 his Vale vale et externum vale.
 
 6 JOHN MILTON 
 
 Milton remained seven years at Cambridge — 
 from 1625 to 1632 — from his sixteenth to his 
 twenty-fourth year. Any intention or thought 
 he ever may have had of taking orders he seems 
 early to have rejected with a characteristic scorn. 
 He considered a state of subscription to articles a 
 state of slavery, and Milton was always determined, 
 whatever else he was or might become, to be his 
 own man. Though never in sympathy with the 
 governing tone of the place, there is no reason to 
 suppose that Milton (any more than others) found 
 this lack seriously to interfere with a fair amount 
 of good solid enjoyment from day to day. He had 
 friends who courted his society, and pursuits both 
 grave and gay to occupy his hours of study and 
 relaxation. He was called the " Lady " of his 
 college, on account of his personal beauty and the 
 purity and daintiness of his life and conversation. 
 
 After leaving Cambridge Milton began his life, 
 
 so attractive to one's thoughts, at Horton, in 
 
 Buckinghamshire, where his father had a house 
 
 in which his mother was living. Here, for five 
 
 years, from his twenty-fourth to his twenty-ninth 
 
 year — a period often stormy in the lives of poets 
 
 — ^he continued his work of self-education. Some 
 
 of his Cambridge friends appear to have grown a 
 
 little anxious on seeing one who had distinction 
 
 stamped upon his brow doing what the world 
 
 calls nothing; and Milton himself was watchful, 
 
 and even suspicious. His second sonnet records 
 
 this state of feeling: 
 
 How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, 
 Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year! 
 My hasting days fly on with full career. 
 But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th.
 
 JOHN MILTON 7 
 
 And yet no poet had ever a more beautiful spring- 
 tide, though it was restless, as spring should be, 
 with the promise of greater things and " high mid- 
 summer pomps." These latter it was that were 
 postponed almost too long. 
 
 Milton at Horton made up his mind to be a 
 great poet — neither more nor less; and with that 
 end in view he toiled unceasingly. A more solemn 
 dedication of a man by himself to the poetical 
 office cannot be imagined. Everything about him 
 became as it were pontifical, almost sacramental. 
 A poet's soul must contain the perfect shape of all 
 things good, wise, and just. His body must be 
 spotless and without blemish, his life pure, his 
 thoughts high, his studies intense. There was no 
 drinking at the " Mermaid " for John Milton. His 
 thoughts, like his joys, were not those that 
 
 Are in widest commonalty spread. 
 
 When in his walks he met the Hodge of his period, 
 he is more likely to have thought of a line in Virgil 
 than of stopping to have a chat with the poor 
 fellow. He became a student of the Italian lan- 
 guage, and writes to a friend: " I who certainly 
 have not merely wetted the tip of my lips in the 
 stream of these (the classical) languages, but in 
 proportion to my years have swallowed the most 
 copious draughts, can yet sometimes retire with 
 avidity and delight to feast on Dante, Petrarch, 
 and many others; nor has Athens itself been able 
 to confine me to the transparent waves of its 
 Ilissus, nor ancient Rome to the banks of its 
 Tiber, so as to prevent my visiting with delight 
 the streams of the Arno and the hills of Faesolse."
 
 8 JOHN MILTON 
 
 Now it was that he, in his often-quoted words 
 written to the young Diodati, doomed to an early- 
 death, was meditating " an immortahty of fame," 
 letting his wings grow and preparing to fly. But 
 dreaming though he ever was of things to come, 
 none the less it was at Horton he composed Comus, 
 Lycidas, U Allegro, and // Penseroso, poems which 
 enable us half sadly to realise how much went 
 and how much was sacrificed to make the author 
 of Paradise Lost. 
 
 After five years' retirement Milton began to feel 
 the want of a little society, of the kind that is 
 " quiet, wise and good," and he meditated taking 
 chambers in one of the Inns of Court, where he 
 could have a pleasant and shady walk under 
 " immemorial elms," and also enjoy the advantages 
 of a few choice associates at home and an elegant 
 society abroad. The death of his mother in 1637 
 gave his thoughts another direction, and he obtained 
 his father's permission to travel in Italy, " that 
 woman-country, wooed not wed," which has been 
 the mistress of so many poetical hearts, and was 
 so of John Milton's. His friends and relatives saw 
 but one difficulty in the way. John Milton the 
 younger, though not at this time a Nonconformist, 
 was a stern and unbending Protestant, and was as 
 bitter an opponent of His Holiness the Pope as he 
 certainly would have been, had his days been 
 prolonged, of His Majesty the Pretender. 
 
 There is something very characteristic in this 
 almost inflamed hostility in the case of a man 
 with such a love of beauty and passion for 
 architecture and music as always abided in 
 Milton, and who could write:
 
 JOHN MILTON 9 
 
 But let my due feet never fail 
 
 To walk the studious cloisters pale, 
 
 And love the high embowed roof, 
 
 With antique pillars massy-proof. 
 
 And storied windows richly dight. 
 
 Casting a dim, religious light. 
 
 There let the pealing organ flow 
 
 To the full-voiced quire below, 
 
 In service high and anthems clear. 
 
 As may with sweetness, through mine ear. 
 
 Dissolve me into ecstacies. 
 
 And bring all heaven before my eyes. 
 
 Here surely is proof of an aesthetic nature beyond 
 most of our modern raptures; but none the less, 
 and at the very same time, Rome was for Milton 
 the " grim wolf " who " with privy paw, daily 
 devours apace." It is with a sigh of sad sincerity 
 that Dr. Newman admits that Milton breathes 
 through his pages a hatred of the Catholic Church, 
 and consequently the Cardinal feels free to call 
 him a proud and rebellious creature of God. That 
 Milton was both proud and rebellious cannot be 
 disputed. Nonconformists need not claim him for 
 their own with much eagerness. What he thought 
 of Presbyterians we know, and he was never a 
 church member, or indeed a churchgoer. Dr. 
 Newman has admitted that the poet Pope was an 
 unsatisfactory Catholic; Milton was certainly an 
 unsatisfactory Dissenter. Let us be candid in 
 these matters. Milton was therefore bidden by 
 his friends, and by those with whom he took 
 counsel, to hold his peace whilst in Rome about 
 the " privy wolf," and he promised to do so, adding, 
 however, the Miltonic proviso that this was on con- 
 dition that the Papists did not attack his religion 
 first. " If anyone," he wrote, " in the very city 
 of the Pope, attacked the orthodox religion, I
 
 lo JOHN MILTON 
 
 defended it most freely." To call the Protestant 
 religion, which had not yet attained to its second 
 century, the orthodox religion under the shadow 
 of the Vatican was to have the courage of his 
 opinions. But Milton was not a man to be 
 frightened of schism. That his religious opinions 
 should be peculiar probably seemed to him to be 
 almost inevitable, and not unbecoming. He would 
 have agreed with Emerson, who declares that 
 would man be great he must be a Nonconformist. 
 There is something very fascinating in the records 
 we have of Milton's one visit to the Continent. A 
 more impressive Englishman never left our shores. 
 Sir Philip Sidney perhaps approaches him nearest. 
 Beautiful beyond praise, and just sufficiently con- 
 scious of it to be careful never to appear at a dis- 
 advantage, dignified in manners, versed in foreign 
 tongues, yet full of the ancient learning, — a gentle- 
 man, a scholar, a poet, a musician, and a Christian, 
 — ^he moved about in a leisurely manner from city 
 to city, writing Latin verses for his hosts and Italian 
 sonnets in their ladies' albums, buying books and 
 music, and creating, one cannot doubt, an all too 
 flattering impression of an English Protestant. To 
 travel in Italy with Montaigne or Milton, or Evelyn 
 or Gray, or Shelley, or, pathetic as it is, with the 
 dying Sir Walter, is perhaps more instructive than 
 to go there for yourself with a tourist's ticket. Old 
 Montaigne, who was but forty-seven when he made 
 his journey, and whom therefore I would not call 
 old had not Pope done so before me, is the most 
 delightful of travelling companions, and as easy as 
 an old shoe. A humaner man than Milton, a wiser 
 man than Evelyn — with none of the constraint of
 
 JOHN MILTON ii 
 
 Gray, or the strange though fascinating outlandish- 
 ness of Shelley — he perhaps was more akin to Scott 
 than any of the other travellers; but Scott went 
 to Italy an overwhelmed man, whose only fear was 
 he might die away from the heather and the murmur 
 of Tweed. However, Milton is the most improving 
 companion of them all, and amidst the impurities 
 of Italy, " in all the places where vice meets with 
 so little discouragement, and is protected with so 
 Httle shame," he remained the Milton of Cambridge 
 and Horton, and did nothing to pollute the pure 
 temple of a poet's mind. He visited Paris, Nice, 
 Genoa, Pisa, and Florence, staying in the last city 
 two months, and living on terms of great in- 
 timacy with seven young Italians, whose musical 
 names he duly records. These were the months of 
 August and September, not nowadays reckoned 
 safe months for Englishmen to be in Florence — 
 modern lives being raised in price. From Florence 
 he proceeded through Siena to Rome, where he 
 also stayed two months. There he was present at 
 a magnificent entertainment given by the Cardinal 
 Francesco Barberini in his palace, and heard the 
 singing of the celebrated Leonora Baroni. It is 
 not for one moment to be supposed that he sought 
 an interview with the Pope, as Montaigne had done, 
 who was exhorted by his holiness " to persevere 
 in the devotion he had ever manifested in the 
 cause of the Church"; and yet perhaps (so subtle 
 are the ways of Literature) Montaigne by his Essays 
 did more to sap the authority of Peter's Chair 
 than Milton, however willing, was able to do. 
 
 It has been remarked that Milton's chief en- 
 thusiasm in Italy was not art, but music, which
 
 12 JOHN MILTON 
 
 falls in with Coleridge's dictiun, that Milton is not 
 so much a picturesque as a musical poet — meaning 
 thereby, I suppose, that the effects which he pro- 
 duces and the scenes which he portrays are rather 
 suggested to us by the rhythm of his lines than 
 by actual verbal descriptions. From Rome Milton 
 went to Naples, from whence he had intended to go 
 to Sicily and Greece, but the troubles beginning 
 at home he forwent this pleasure, and conse- 
 quently never saw Athens, which was surely a 
 great pity. He returned to Rome, where, troubles 
 or no troubles, he stayed another two months. 
 From Rome he went back to Florence, which he 
 found too pleasant to leave under two more 
 months. Then he went to Lucca, and so to Venice, 
 where he was very stern with himself, and only 
 lingered a month. From Venice he went to Milan, 
 and then over the Alps to Geneva, where he had 
 dear friends. He was back in London in August 
 1639, after an absence of fifteen months. 
 
 The times were troubled enough. Poor Charles L, 
 whose literary taste was so good that one must 
 regret the mischance that placed a crown upon his 
 comely head, was trying hard, at the bidding of a 
 priest, to thrust Episcopacy down Scottish throats 
 who would not have it at any price. He was des- 
 perately in need of money, and the House of 
 Commons (which had then a raison d'etre) was not 
 prepared to give him any except on terms. Alto- 
 gether it was an exciting time, but Milton was in 
 no way specially concerned in it. Milton looms so 
 large in our imagination amongst the figures of the 
 period, that, despite Dr. Johnson's sneers, we are 
 apt to forget his political insignificance, and to
 
 JOHN MILTON 13 
 
 fancy him curtailing his tour and returning home 
 to take his place amongst the leaders of the Par- 
 liament men. Return home he did, but it was, as 
 another pedagogue has reminded us, to receive 
 boys " to be boarded and instructed." Dr. Johnson 
 tells us that we ought not to allow our veneration 
 for Milton to rob us of a joke at the expense of 
 a man " who hastens home because his country- 
 men are contending for their liberty, and when 
 he reaches the scene of action vapours away his 
 patriotism in a private boarding-school"; but 
 that this observation was dictated by the good 
 Doctor's spleen is made plain by his immediately 
 proceeding to point out, with his accustomed good 
 sense, that there is really nothing to laugh at, since 
 it was desirable that Milton, whose father was alive 
 and could only make him a small allowance, should 
 do something, and there was no shame in his 
 adopting an honest and useful employment. 
 
 To be a Parliament man was no part of the 
 ambition of one who still aspired to be a poet; 
 who was not yet blind to the heavenly vision; 
 who was still meditating what should be his theme, 
 and who in the meantime chastised his sister's 
 sons, unruly lads, who did him no credit and bore 
 him no great love. 
 
 The Long Parliament met in November 1640, 
 and began its work, — brought Strafford to the 
 scaffold, clapped Laud into the Tower, Archbishop 
 though he was, and secured as best they could the 
 permanency of parliamentary institutions. None 
 of these things specially concerned John Milton. 
 But there also uprose the eternal Church question, 
 " What sort of Church are we to have ? " The
 
 14 JOHN MILTON 
 
 fierce controversy raged, and " its fair enticing 
 
 fruit," spread round " with liberal hand," proved 
 
 too much for the father of English epic. 
 
 He scrupled not to eat 
 Against his better knowledge. 
 
 In other words, he comrnenced pamphleteer, and 
 between May 1641 and the following March he 
 had written five pamphlets against Episcopacy, 
 and used an intolerable deal of bad language, 
 which, however excusable in a heated contro- 
 versialist, ill became the author of Comus. 
 
 The war broke out in 1642, but Milton kept house. 
 The " tented field " had no attractions for him. 
 
 In the summer of 1643 he took a sudden journey 
 into the country, and returned home to his boys 
 with a wife, the daughter of an Oxfordshire 
 Cavalier. Mary Powell was but seventeen, her 
 poetic lord was thirty-five. From the country- 
 house of a rollicking squire to Aldersgate Street 
 was somewhat too violent a change. She had left 
 ten brothers and sisters behind her, the eldest 
 twenty-one, the youngest four. As one looks upon 
 this picture and on that, there is no need to wonder 
 that the poor girl was unhappy. The poet, though 
 keenly alive to the subtle charm of a woman's 
 personality, was unpractised in the arts of daily 
 companionship. He expected to find much more 
 than he brought of general good-fellowship. He 
 had an ideal ever in his mind of both bodily and 
 spiritual excellence, and he was almost greedy to 
 realise both, but he knew not how. One of his 
 complaints was that his wife was mute and in- 
 sensate, and sat silent at his board. It must, no 
 doubt, have been deadly dull, that house in Alders-
 
 JOHN MILTON 15 
 
 gate Street. Silence reigned, save when broken by 
 the cries of the younger Phillips sustaining chastise- 
 ment. Milton had none of that noble humanitarian 
 spirit which had led Montaigne long years before 
 him to protest against the cowardly traditions of 
 the schoolroom. After a month of Aldersgate 
 Street, Mrs. Milton begged to go home. Her wish 
 was granted, and she ran back to her ten brothers 
 and sisters, and when her leave of absence was up 
 refused to return. Her husband was furiously 
 angry; and in a time so short as almost to enforce 
 the belief that he began the work during the 
 honeymoon, was ready with his celebrated pam- 
 phlet, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce restored 
 to the good of both sexes. He is even said, with his 
 accustomed courage, to have paid attentions to a 
 Miss Davis, who is described as a very handsome 
 and witty gentlewoman, and therefore not one 
 likely to sit silent at his board; but she was a 
 sensible girl as well, and had no notion of a married 
 suitor. Of Milton's pamphlet it is everyone's duty 
 to speak with profound respect. It is a noble and 
 passionate cry for a high ideal of married life, 
 which, so he argued, had by inflexible laws been 
 changed into a drooping and disconsolate house- 
 hold captivity, without refuge or redemption. He 
 shuddered at the thought of a man and woman 
 being condemned, for a mistake of judgment, to 
 be bound together to their unspeakable weari- 
 someness and despair, for, he says, not to be 
 beloved and yet retained is the greatest injury 
 to a gentle spirit. Our present doctrine of divorce, 
 which sets the household captive free on payment 
 of a broken vow, but on no less ignoble terms, is
 
 i6 JOHN MILTON 
 
 not founded on the congruous, and is indeed already 
 discredited if not disgraced. 
 
 This pamphlet on divorce marks the beginning 
 of Milton's mental isolation. Nobody had a word 
 to say for it. Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and 
 Independent held his doctrine in as much abhor- 
 rence as did the Catholic, and all alike regarded its 
 author as either an impracticable dreamer or worse. 
 It was written certainly in too great haste, for his 
 errant wife, actuated by what motives cannot now 
 be said, returned to her allegiance, was mindful of 
 her plighted troth, and, suddenly entering his room, 
 fell at his feet and begged to be forgiven. She was 
 only nineteen, and she said it was all her mother's 
 fault. Milton was not a sour man, and though 
 perhaps too apt to insist upon repentance preceding 
 forgiveness, yet when it did so he could forgive 
 divinely. In a very short time the whole family of 
 Powells, whom the war had reduced to low estate, 
 were living under his roof in the Barbican, whither 
 he moved on the Aldersgate house proving too 
 small for his varied belongings. The poet's father 
 also lived with his son. Mrs. Milton had four 
 children, three of whom, all daughters, lived to 
 grow up. The mother died in childbirth in 1652, 
 being then twenty-six years of age. 
 
 The Areopagitica^ a Speech for Unlicensed Print- 
 ing, followed the divorce pamphlet, but it also fell 
 upon deaf ears. Of all religious sects the Presby- 
 terians, who were then dominant, are perhaps the 
 least likely to forgo the privilege of interference in 
 the affairs of others. Instead of the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury and the Bishop of London, instead of 
 " a lordly Imprimatur, one from Lambeth House,
 
 JOHN MILTON 17 
 
 another from the west end of Paul's," there was 
 appointed a commission of twenty Presbyterians 
 to act as State Licensers. Then was Milton's soul 
 stirred within him to a noble rage. His was a 
 threefold protest — as a citizen of a State he fondly 
 hoped had been free, as an author, and as a reader. 
 As a citizen he protested against so unnecessary 
 and improper an interference. It is not, he cried, 
 ** the unfrocking of a priest, the unmitring of a 
 bishop, that will make us a happy nation," but 
 the practice of virtue, and virtue means freedom 
 to choose. Milton was a manly politician, and 
 detested with his whole soul grandmotherly legis- 
 lation. " He who is not trusted with his own 
 actions, his drift not being known to be evil, and 
 standing to the hazard of law and penalty, has no 
 great argument to think himself reputed in the 
 commonwealth wherein he was born for other than 
 a fool or a foreigner." " They are not skilful con- 
 siderers of human things who imagine to remove 
 sin by removing the matter of sin." " And were I 
 the chooser, a dram of well-doing should be pre- 
 ferred before many times as much the forcible 
 hindrance of evil doing." These are texts upon 
 which sermons, not inapplicable to our own day, 
 might be preached. Milton has made our first 
 parent so peculiarly his own that any observations 
 of his about Adam are interesting. " Many there 
 be that complain of Divine Providence for suffering 
 Adam to transgress. Foohsh tongues! When God 
 gave him reason He gave him freedom to choose, 
 for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere 
 artificial Adam. We ourselves esteem not of that 
 obedience a love or gift which is of force. God 
 
 I B
 
 i8 JOHN MILTON 
 
 therefore left him free, set before him a provoking 
 object ever almost in his eyes; herein consisted 
 his merit, herein the right of his reward, the praise 
 of his abstinence." So that according to Milton 
 even Eden was a state of trial. As an author, 
 Milton's protest has great force. " And what if 
 the author shall be one so copious of fancy as to 
 have many things well worth the adding come 
 into his mind after licensing, while the book is 
 yet under the press, which not seldom happens 
 to the best and diligentest writers, and that perhaps 
 a dozen times in one book. The printer dares not 
 go beyond his licensed copy. So often then must 
 the author trudge to his leave-giver that those his 
 new insertions may be viewed, and many a jaunt 
 will be made ere that licenser — for it must be the 
 same man — can either be found, or found at leisure; 
 meanwhile either the press must stand still, which 
 is no small damage, or the author lose his accuratest 
 thoughts, and send forth a book worse than he 
 made it, which to a diligent writer is the greatest 
 melancholy and vexation that can befall." 
 
 Milton would have had no licensers. Every book 
 should bear the printer's name, and " mischievous 
 and libellous books " were to be burnt by the common 
 hangman, not as an effectual remedy, but as the 
 " most effectual remedy man's prevention can use." 
 
 The noblest pamphlet in " our English, the 
 language of men ever famous and foremost in the 
 achievements of liberty," accomplished nothing, 
 and its author must already have thought himself 
 fallen on evil days. 
 
 In the year 1645, the year of Naseby, as Mr. 
 Pattison reminds us, appeared the first edition of
 
 JOHN MILTON 19 
 
 Milton's Poems. Then, for the first time, were 
 printed U Allegro and // Penseroso, the Ode on the 
 Morning of Christ's Nativity, and various of the 
 sonnets. The httle volume also contained Comus 
 and Lycidas, which had been previously printed. 
 With the exception of three sonnets and a few 
 scraps of translation, Milton had written nothing 
 but pamphlets since his return from Italy. At the 
 beginning of the volume, which is a small octavo, 
 was a portrait of the poet, most villainously exe- 
 cuted. He was really thirty-seven, but flattered 
 himself, as men of that age will, that he looked 
 ten years younger; he was therefore much chag- 
 rined to find himself represented as a grim-looking 
 gentleman of at least fifty. The way he revenged 
 himself upon the hapless artist is well known. 
 The volume, with the portrait, is now very scarce, 
 almost rare. 
 
 In 1647 Milton removed from the Barbican, both 
 his father and his father-in-law being dead, to a 
 smaller house in Holborn, backing upon Lincoln's 
 Inn Fields, close to where the Inns of Court Hotel 
 now stands, and not far from the spot which was 
 destined to witness the terrible tragedy which was 
 at once to darken and glorify the life of one of 
 Milton's most fervent lovers, Charles Lamb. About 
 this time he is supposed to have abandoned ped- 
 agogy. The habit of pamphleteering stuck to 
 him; indeed, it is one seldom thrown off. It is 
 much easier to throw off the pamphlets. 
 
 In 1649 Milton became a pubHc servant, receiv- 
 ing the appointment of Latin Secretary to the 
 Council of Foreign Affairs. He knew some member 
 of the Committee, who obtained his nomination.
 
 20 JOHN MILTON 
 
 His duties were purely clerkly. It was his business 
 to translate English despatches into Latin, and 
 foreign despatches into English. He had nothing 
 whatever to do with the shaping of the foreign 
 policy of the Commonwealth. He was not even 
 employed in translating the most important of the 
 State papers. There is no reason for supposing 
 that he even knew the leading politicians of his 
 time. There is a print one sees about, representing 
 Oliver Cromwell dictating a foreign despatch to 
 John Milton; but it is all imagination, nor is there 
 anything to prove that Cromwell and Milton, the 
 body and soul of English Republicanism, were ever 
 in the same room together, or exchanged words 
 with one another. Milton's name does not occur 
 in the great history of Lord Clarendon. White- 
 locke, who was the leading member of the Com- 
 mittee which Milton served, only mentions him 
 once. Thurloe spoke of him as a blind man who 
 wrote Latin letters. Richard Baxter, in his folio 
 history of his Life and Times, never mentions 
 Milton at all.i He was just a clerk in the service 
 of the Commonwealth, of a scholarly bent, peculiar 
 habit of thought, and somewhat of an odd temper. 
 He was not the man to cultivate great acquaint- 
 ances, or to fritter away his time waiting the con- 
 venience of other people. When once asked to use 
 his influence to obtain for a friend an appointment, 
 he replied he had no influence, " propter paucissi- 
 mas familiaritates meas cum gratiosis, qui domi 
 fere, idque libenter, me contineo." The busy great 
 men of the day would have been more than 
 astonished, they would have been disgusted, had 
 
 ^ See note to Mitford's Milton, Vol. I. clii.
 
 JOHN MILTON 21 
 
 they been told that posterity would refer to most 
 of them compendiously, as having lived in the age 
 of Milton. But this need not trouble us. 
 
 On the Continent Milton enjoyed a wider reputa- 
 tion, on account of his controversy with the great 
 European scholar, Salmasius, on the sufficiently 
 important and interesting, and then novel, subject 
 of the execution of Charles I. Was it justifiable ? 
 Salmasius, a scholar and a Protestant, though of 
 an easy-going description, was employed, or rather, 
 as he had no wages (Milton's hundred Jacobuses 
 being fictitious), nominated by Charles, afterwards 
 the Second, to indict the regicides at the bar of 
 European opinion, which accordingly he did in the 
 Latin language. The work reached this country in 
 the autumn of 1649, and it evidently became the 
 duty of somebody to answer it. Two qualifications 
 were necessary — the replier must be able to read 
 Latin, and to write it after a manner which should 
 escape the ridicule of the scholars of Leyden, 
 Geneva, and Paris. Milton occurred to somebody's 
 mind, and the task was entrusted to him. It is not 
 to be supposed that Cromwell was ever at the pains 
 to read Salmasius for himself, but still it would not 
 have done to have it said that the Defensio Regia 
 of so celebrated a scholar as Salmasius remained 
 unanswered, and so the appointment was confirmed, 
 and Milton, no new hand at a pamphlet, set to work. 
 In March 1651 his first Defence of the English People 
 was in print. In this great pamphlet Milton asserts, 
 as against the doctrine of the divine right of kings, 
 the undisputed sovereignty of the people; and he 
 maintains the proposition that, as well by the law 
 of God, as by the law of nations, and the law of
 
 22 JOHN MILTON 
 
 England, a king of England may be brought to 
 trial and death, the people being discharged from 
 all obligations of loyalty when a lawful prince 
 becomes a tyrant, or gives himself over to sloth 
 and voluptuousness. This noble argument, alike 
 worthy of the man and the occasion, is doubtless 
 overclouded and disfigured by personal abuse of 
 Salmasius, whose relations with his wife had surely 
 as little to do with the head of Charles I. as had 
 poor Mr. Dick's memorial. Salmasius, it appears, 
 was henpecked, and to allow yourself to be hen- 
 pecked was, in Milton's opinion, a high crime and 
 misdemeanour against humanity, and one which 
 rendered a man infamous, and disqualified him 
 from taking part in debate. 
 
 It has always been reported that Salmasius, who 
 was getting on in years, and had many things to 
 trouble him besides his own wife, perished in the 
 effort of writing a reply to Milton, in which he 
 made use of language quite as bad as any of his 
 opponent's; but it now appears that this is not so. 
 Indeed, it is generally rash to attribute a man's 
 death to a pamphlet, or an article, either of his own 
 or anybody else's. 
 
 Salmasius, however, died, though from natural 
 causes, and his reply was not published till after 
 the Restoration, when the question had become, 
 what it has ever since remained, academical. 
 
 Other pens were quicker, and to their produc- 
 tions Milton, in 1654, replied with his Second 
 Defence of the English People, a tract containing 
 autobiographical details of immense interest and 
 charm. By this time he was totally blind, though, 
 with a touch of that personal sensitiveness ever
 
 JOHN MILTON 23 
 
 characteristic of him, he is careful to tell Europe, 
 in the Second Defence, that externally his eyes were 
 uninjured, and shone with an unclouded light. 
 
 Milton's Defences of the English People are ren- 
 dered provoking by his extraordinary language 
 concerning his opponents. " Numskull," " beast," 
 " fool," " puppy," " knave," " ass," " mongrel- 
 cur," are but a few of the epithets that may be 
 selected for this descriptive catalogue. This is 
 doubtless mere matter of pleading, a rule of the 
 forum where controversies between scholars are 
 conducted; but for that very reason it makes the 
 pamphlets as provoking to an ordinary reader as 
 an old bill of complaint in Chancery must have been 
 to an impatient suitor who wanted his money. The 
 main issues, when cleared of personalities, are im- 
 portant enough, and are stated by Milton with 
 great clearness. " Our king made not us, but we 
 him. Nature has given fathers to us all, but we 
 ourselves appointed our own king; so that the 
 people is not for the king, but the king for them." 
 It was made a matter of great offence amongst 
 monarchs and monarchical persons that Charles 
 was subjected to the indignity of a trial. With 
 murders and poisonings kings were long familiar. 
 These were part of the perils of the voyage, for 
 which they were prepared, but, as Salmasius put 
 it, " for a king to be arraigned in a court of judi- 
 cature, to be put to plead for his life, to have 
 sentence of death pronounced against him, and 
 that sentence executed," — oh! horrible impiety. 
 To this Milton replies : " Tell me, thou superlative 
 fool, whether it be not more just, more agreeable to 
 the rules of humanity and the laws of all human
 
 24 JOHN MILTON 
 
 societies, to bring a criminal, be his offence what 
 it will, before a court of justice, to give him leave 
 to speak for himself, and if the law condemns him, 
 then to put him to death as he has deserved, so as 
 he may have time to repent or to recollect himself; 
 than presently, as soon as ever he is taken, to 
 butcher him without more ado ? " 
 
 But a king of any spirit would probably answer 
 that he preferred to have his despotism tempered 
 by assassination than by the mercy of a court of 
 John Miltons. To which answer Milton would have 
 rejoined, " Despotism, I know you not, since we 
 are as free as any people under heaven." 
 
 The weakest part in Milton's case is his having 
 to admit that the Parliament was overawed by the 
 army, which he says was wiser than the senators. 
 
 Milton's address to his countrymen, with which 
 he concludes the first defence, is veritably in his 
 " grand style " : 
 
 He has gloriously delivered you, the first of nations, from 
 the two greatest mischiefs of this life — tyranny and super- 
 stition. He has endued you with greatness of mind to be 
 First of Mankind, who after having confined their own king 
 and having had him delivered into their hands, have not 
 scrupled to condemn him judicially, and pursuant to that 
 sentence of condemnation to put him to death. After per- 
 forming so glorious an action as this, you ought to do nothing 
 that's mean and little; you ought not to think of, much less 
 do, anything but what is great and sublime. Which to attain 
 to, this is your only way: as you have subdued your enemies 
 in the field, so to make it appear that you of all mankind are 
 best able to subdue Ambition, Avarice, the love of Riches, 
 and can best avoid the corruptions that prosperity is apt to 
 introduce. These are the only arguments by which you will 
 be able to evince that you are not such persons as this fellow 
 represents you, traitors, robbers, murderers, parricides, mad- 
 men, that you did not put your king to death out of any 
 ambitious design — that it was not an act of fury or madness, 
 but that it was wholly out of love to your liberty, your religion.
 
 JOHN MILTON 25 
 
 to justice, virtue, and your country, that 3'ou punished a 
 tyrant. But if it should fall out otherwise (which God forbid), 
 if, as you have been valiant in war, you should grow debauched 
 in peace, and that you should not have learnt, by so eminent, 
 so remarkable an example before your eyes, to fear God, and 
 work righteousness; for my part I shall easily grant and 
 confess (for I cannot deny it), whatever ill men may speak or 
 think of you, to be very true. And you will find in time that 
 God's displeasure against you will be greater than it has been 
 against your adversaries — greater than His grace and favour 
 have been to yourselves, which you have had larger experience 
 of than any other nation under heaven. 
 
 This controversy naturally excited greater in- 
 terest abroad, where Latin was familiarly known, 
 than ever it did here at home. Though it cost 
 Milton his sight, or at all events accelerated the 
 hour of his blindness, he appears greatly to have 
 enjoyed conducting a high dispute in the face of 
 Europe. " I am," so he says, " spreading abroad 
 amongst the cities, the kingdoms, and nations, the 
 restored culture of civility and freedom of hfe." 
 We certainly managed in this affair of the 
 execution of Charles to get rid of that note of 
 insularity which renders our politics uninviting to 
 the stranger. 
 
 Milton, despite his blindness, remained in the 
 public service until after the death of Cromwell; 
 in fact, he did not formally resign until after the 
 Restoration. He played no part, having none to 
 play, in the performances that occurred between 
 those events. He poured forth pamphlets, but 
 there is no reason to believe that they were read 
 otherwise than carelessly and by few. His ideas 
 were his own, and never had a chance of becoming 
 fruitful. There seemed to him to be a ready and 
 an easy way to establish a free Commonwealth, 
 but on the whole it turned out that the easiest
 
 26 JOHN MILTON 
 
 thing to do was to invite Charles Stuart to reascend 
 the throne of his ancestors, which he did, and 
 Milton went into hiding. 
 
 It is terrible to think how risky the situation 
 was. Milton was undoubtedly in danger of his 
 life, and Paradise Lost was unwritten. He was 
 for a time under arrest. But after all he was not 
 one of the regicides — he was only a scribe who had 
 defended regicide. Neither was he a man well 
 associated. He was a solitary, and, for the most 
 part, an unpopular thinker, and blind withal. He 
 was left alone for the rest of his days. He lived 
 first in Jewin Street, off Aldersgate Street, and 
 finally in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields. He had 
 married, four years after his first wife's death, a 
 lady who died within a twelvemonth, though her 
 memory is kept ever fresh, generation after genera- 
 tion, by her husband's sonnet beginning, 
 
 Methought I saw my late espoused saint. 
 
 Dr. Johnson, it is really worth remembering, called 
 this a poor sonnet. In 1664 Milton married a third 
 and last wife, a lady he had never seen, and who 
 survived her husband for no less a period than 
 fifty-three years, not dying till the year 1 727. The 
 poet's household, like his country, never realised 
 any of his ideals. His third wife took decent care 
 of him, and there the matter ended. He did not 
 belong to the category of adored fathers. His 
 daughters did not love him — it seems even probable 
 they disliked him. Mr. Pattison has pointed out 
 that Milton never was on terms even with the 
 scholars of his age. Political acquaintances he 
 had none. He was, in puritan language, " un-
 
 JOHN MILTON 27 
 
 connected with any place of worship," and had 
 therefore no pastoral visits to receive, or sermons 
 to discuss. The few friends he had were mostly 
 young men who were attracted to him, and were 
 glad to give him their company; and it is well 
 that he had this pleasure, for he was ever in his 
 wishes a social man — not intended to live alone, 
 and blindness must have made society little short 
 of a necessity for him. 
 
 Now it was, in the evening of his days, with 
 a Stuart once more upon the throne, and Epis- 
 copacy finally installed, that Milton, a defeated 
 thinker, a baffled pamphleteer — for had not Sal- 
 masius triumphed ? — with Horton and Italy far, 
 far behind him, set himself to keep the promise 
 of his glorious youth, and compose a poem the 
 world should not willingly let die. His manner of 
 life was this. In summer he rose at four, in winter 
 at five. He went to bed at nine. He began the day 
 with having the Hebrew Scriptures read to him. 
 Then he contemplated. At seven his man came 
 to him again, and read and wrote till an early 
 dinner. For exercise he either walked in the garden 
 or swung in a machine. Besides conversation, his 
 only other recreation was music. He played the 
 organ and the bass viol. He would sometimes sing 
 himself. After recreation of this kind he would 
 return to his study to be read to till six. After 
 six his friends were admitted, and would sit with 
 him till eight. At eight he had his supper — olives 
 or something light. He was very abstemious. 
 After supper he smoked a pipe of tobacco, drank 
 a glass of water, and went to bed. He found the 
 night a favourable time for composition, and what
 
 28 JOHN MILTON 
 
 he composed at night he dictated in the day, sitting 
 obliquely in an elbow chair with his leg thrown 
 over the arm. 
 
 In 1664 Paradise Lost was finished, but as in 
 1665 came the Great Plague, and after the Great 
 Plague the Great Fire, it was long before the MS. 
 found its way into the hands of the licenser. It is 
 interesting to note that the first member of the 
 general public who read Paradise Lost, I hope all 
 through, was a clergyman of the name of Tomkins,^ 
 the deputy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. 
 Sheldon. The Archbishop was the State Licenser 
 for religious books, but of course did not do the 
 work himself. Tomkins did the work, and was 
 for a good while puzzled what to make of the old 
 Republican's poem. At last, and after some 
 singularly futile criticisms, Tomkins consented to 
 allow of the publication of Paradise Lost, which 
 accordingly appeared in 1667, admirably printed, 
 and at the price of 35. a copy. The author's agree- 
 ment with the publisher is in writing — as Mr. 
 Besant tells us all agreements with publishers 
 should be — ^and may be seen in the British Museum. 
 Its terms are clear. The poet was to have ^5 down; 
 another ^5 when the first edition, which was not to 
 exceed 1500 copies, was sold; a third ^5 when a 
 second edition was sold; and a fourth and last ^^5 
 when a third edition was sold. He got his first 
 j^5, also his second, and after his death his widow 
 sold all her rights for ^^8. Consequently ^18, which 
 represents perhaps ^^50 of our present currency, 
 was Milton's share of all the money that has been 
 made by the sale of his great poem. But the praise 
 
 ' See " Tomkins Redivivus." post, vol. iii, p. 249.
 
 JOHN MILTON 29 
 
 is still his. The sale was very considerable. The 
 " general reader " no doubt preferred the poems 
 of Cleaveland and Flatman, but Milton found an 
 audience which was fit and not fewer than ever is 
 the case when noble poetry is first produced. 
 
 Paradise Regained was begun upon the comple- 
 tion of Paradise Lost, and appeared with Samson 
 Agonistes in 1671, and here ended Milton's life as 
 a producing poet. He lived on till Sunday, 8th 
 November, 1674, when the gout, or what was then 
 called gout, struck in and he died, and was buried 
 beside his father in the Church of St. Giles's, 
 Cripplegate. He remained laborious to the last, 
 and imposed upon himself all kinds of drudgery, 
 compiling dictionaries, histories of Britain and 
 Russia. He must have worked not so much from 
 love of his subjects as from dread of idleness. But 
 he had hours of relaxation, of social intercourse, 
 and of music; and it is pleasant to remember that 
 one pipe of tobacco. It consecrates your own. 
 
 Against Milton's great poem it is sometimes 
 alleged that it is not read; and yet it must, I 
 think, be admitted that for one person who has 
 read Spenser's Faerie Queene, ten thousand might 
 easily be found who have read Paradise Lost. Its 
 popularity has been widespread. Mr. Mark Patti- 
 son and Mr. John Bright measure some ground 
 between them. No other poem can be mentioned 
 which has so coloured English thought as Milton's, 
 and yet, according to the French senator whom 
 Mr. Arnold has introduced to the plain reader, 
 " Paradise Lost is a false poem, a grotesque poem, 
 a tiresome poem." It is not easy for those who 
 have a touch of Milton's temper though none of
 
 30 JOHN MILTON 
 
 his genius to listen to this foreign criticism quite 
 coolly. Milton was very angry with Salmasius for 
 venturing to find fault with the Long Parliament 
 for having repealed so many laws, and so far forgot 
 himself as to say, " Nam nostrse leges, Ole, quid 
 ad te ? " But there is nothing municipal about 
 Paradise Lost. All the world has a right to be 
 interested in it and to find fault with it. But the 
 fact that the people for whom primarily it was 
 written have taken it to their hearts and have it 
 on their lips ought to have prevented it being 
 called tiresome by a senator of France. 
 
 But what is the matter with our great epic ? That 
 nobody ever wished it longer is no real accusation. 
 Nobody ever did wish an epic longer. The most 
 popular books in the world are generally accounted 
 too long — Don Quixote, the Pilgrim'' s Progress, Tom 
 Jones. But, says Mr. Arnold, the whole real 
 interest of the poem depends upon our being able 
 to take it literally; and again, " Merely as matter 
 of poetry, the story of the Fall has no special force 
 or effectiveness — its effectiveness for us comes, and 
 can only come, from our taking it all as the literal 
 narrative of what positively happened." These 
 bewildering utterances make one rub one's eyes. 
 Carlyle comes to our relief: "All which proposi- 
 tions I for the present content myself with modestly 
 but peremptorily and irrevocably denying." 
 
 Mr. Pattison surely speaks the language of 
 ordinary good sense when he writes, " For the 
 world of Paradise Lost is an ideal, conventional 
 world quite as much as the world of the Arabian 
 Nights, or the world of the chivalrous romance, 
 or that of the pastoral novel."
 
 JOHN MILTON 31 
 
 Coleridge, in the twenty-second chapter of the 
 Biographia LiUraria, points out that the fable and 
 characters of Paradise Lost are not derived from 
 Scripture, as in the Messiah of Klopstock, but 
 merely suggested by it — the illusion on which all 
 poetry is founded being thus never contradicted. 
 The poem proceeds upon a legend, ancient and 
 fascinating, and to call it a commentary upon a 
 few texts in Genesis is a marvellous criticism. 
 
 The story of the Fall of Man, as recorded in the 
 Semitic legend, is to me more attractive as a story 
 than the Tale of Troy, and I find the rebellion 
 of Satan and his dire revenge more to my mind 
 than the circles of Dante. Eve is, I think, more 
 interesting than " Heaven-born Helen, Sparta's 
 queen," — I mean in herself, and as a woman to 
 write poetry about. 
 
 The execution of the poem is another matter. 
 So far as style is concerned its merits have not yet 
 been questioned. As a master of style and diction, 
 Milton is as safe as Virgil. The handling of the 
 story is more vulnerable. The long speeches put 
 in the mouth of the Almighty are never pleasing, 
 and seldom effective. The weak point about argu- 
 ment is that it usually admits of being answered. 
 For Milton to essay to justify the ways of God to 
 man was well and pious enough, but to represent 
 God Himself as doing so by argumentative process 
 was not so well, and was to expose the Almighty 
 to possible rebuff. The king is always present in 
 his own courts, but as judge, not as advocate; 
 hence the royal dignity never suffers. 
 
 It is narrated of an eminent barrister, who 
 became a most polished judge, Mr. Knight Bruce,
 
 32 JOHN MILTON 
 
 that once, when at the very head of his profession, 
 he was taken in before a Master in Chancery, an 
 office since aboHshed, and found himself pitted 
 against a Httle snip of an attorney's clerk, scarce 
 higher than the table, who, nothing daunted, and 
 by the aid of authorities he cited from a bundle of 
 books as big as himself, succeeded in worsting 
 Knight Bruce, whom he persisted in calling over 
 and over again " my learned friend." Mr. Bruce 
 treated the imp with that courtesy which is always 
 an opponent's due, but he never went before the 
 Masters any more. 
 
 The Archangel has not escaped the reproach 
 often brought against affable persons of being 
 a bit of a bore, and though this is to speak un- 
 becomingly, it must be owned that the reader is 
 glad whenever Adam plucks up heart of grace and 
 gets in a word edgeways. Mr. Bagehot has com- 
 plained of Milton's angels. He says they are silly. 
 But this is, I think, to intellectualise too much. 
 There are some classes who are fairly exempted 
 from all obligation to be intelligent, and these airy 
 messengers are surely amongst that number. The 
 retinue of a prince or of a bride justify their choice 
 if they are well-looking and group nicely. 
 
 But these objections do not touch the main issue. 
 Here is the story of the loss of Eden, told enchant- 
 ingly, musically, and in the grand style. " Who," 
 says M. Scherer, in a passage quoted by Mr. Arnold, 
 " can read the eleventh and twelfth books without 
 yawning ? " People, of course, are free to yawn 
 when they please, provided they put their hands 
 to their mouths; but in answer to this insulting 
 question, one is glad to be able to remember how
 
 JOHN MILTON 33 
 
 Coleridge has singled out Adam's vision of future 
 events contained in these books as especially de- 
 serving of attention. But to read them is to repel 
 the charge. 
 
 There was no need for Mr. Arnold, of all men, to 
 express dissatisfaction with Milton — 
 
 Words which no ear ever to hear in heaven 
 Expected ; least of all from thee, ingrate, 
 In place thyself so high above thy peers. 
 
 The first thing for people to be taught is to enjoy 
 great things greatly. The spots on the sun may be 
 an interesting study, but anyhow the sun is not all 
 spots. Indeed, sometimes in the early year, when 
 he breaks forth afresh. 
 
 And winter, slumbering in the open air. 
 Wears on her smiling face a dream of spring, 
 
 we are apt to forget that he has any spots at all, 
 and, as he shines, are perhaps reminded of the 
 blind poet sitting in his darkness, in this prosaic 
 city of ours, swinging his leg over the arm of his 
 chair, and dictating the lines — 
 
 Seasons return, but not to me returns 
 
 Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn, 
 
 Or sight of vernal bloom or summer's rose. 
 
 Or flocks or herds, or human face divine. 
 
 But cloud instead, and ever-during dark 
 
 Surrounds me — from the cheerful ways of men 
 
 Cut off; and for the book of knowledge fair 
 
 Presented with a universal blank 
 
 Of nature's works, to me expunged and razed, 
 
 And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out. 
 
 So much the rather. Thou, Celestial Light, 
 
 Shine inwards, and the mind through all her powers 
 
 Irradiate — there plant eyes; all mist from thence 
 
 Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell 
 
 Of things invisible to mortal sight. 
 
 Coleridge added a note to his beautiful poem 
 I c
 
 34 JOHN MILTON 
 
 The Nightingale^ lest he should be supposed capable 
 of speaking with levity of a single line in Milton. 
 The note was hardly necessary, but one loves the 
 spirit that prompted him to make it. Sainte-Beuve 
 remarks : " Parler des poetes est toujours une 
 chose bien delicate, et surtout quand on I'a ete 
 un peu soi-meme." But though it does not matter 
 what the little poets do, great ones should never 
 pass one another without a royal salute.
 
 ROGER NORTH'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 
 
 1894 
 
 THE Cambridge wit who some vast amount 
 of years ago sang of Bohn's publications, 
 " so useful to the student of Latin and 
 Greek," hit with unerring precision the main char- 
 acteristic of those very numerous volumes. Utihty 
 was the badge of all that tribe, save, indeed, of 
 those woeful " Extra Volumes " which are as much 
 out of place amongst their grave brethren as John 
 Knox at a ballet. There was something in the bind- 
 ing of Messrs. Bohn's books which was austere, and 
 even forbidding; their excellence, their authority, 
 could not be denied by even a youthful desperado, 
 but reading them always wore the stern aspect of 
 duty. The binding had undoubtedly a good deal to 
 do with this. It has now been discarded by Messrs. 
 George Bell and Sons, the present proprietors, in 
 favour of brighter colours. The difference thus 
 effected is enormous. The old binding is kept in 
 stock because, so we are told, " it is endeared to 
 many book-lovers by association." The piety of 
 Messrs. Bell has misled them. No book-lover, 
 we feel certain, ever held one of Messrs. Bohn's 
 pubhcations in his hands except to read it. 
 
 A valuable addition has lately been made to the 
 " Standard Library " by the publication — in three 
 bright and cheerful volumes — of Roger North's 
 well-known Lives of the Norths, and also — and this 
 
 35
 
 36 NORTH'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 
 
 practically for the first time — of Roger North's 
 Autobiography, a book unknown to Macaulay, and 
 which he would have read with fierce interest, 
 bludgeon in hand, having no love for the family. 
 
 Dr. Jessopp, who edits the volumes with his 
 accustomed skill, mentions in the Preface how the 
 manuscript of the Autobiography belonged to the 
 late Mr. Crossley, of Manchester, and was sold 
 after the death of that bibhophile, in 1883, and 
 four years later printed for private circulation. It 
 now comes before the general public. It is not long, 
 and deserves attention. The style is gritty and the 
 story far from exciting, but the book is interest- 
 ing, particularly for lawyers, a deserving class of 
 readers for whose special entertainment small care 
 is usually taken. 
 
 Roger North was born at Tostock, in Suffolk, in 
 1653 — the youngest of his brothers. Never was 
 man more of a younger brother than he. This 
 book of his might be called The Autobiography of 
 a Younger Brother. The elder brother was, of 
 course, Francis, afterwards Lord Guilford, a well- 
 hated man, both in his own day and after it, but 
 who at all events looked well after Roger, who was 
 some sixteen years his junior. 
 
 In 1669 Roger North was admitted a student of 
 the Middle Temple, Francis being then a Bencher 
 of that learned society. Roger had chambers on 
 the west side of Middle Temple Lane, and ^^lo 
 wherewith to furnish them and buy a gown, and 
 other necessaries. He says it was not enough, but 
 that he managed to make it serve. His excellent 
 mother, though she had some ten children and a 
 difficult husband, produced ^30, with which he
 
 NORTH'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 37 
 
 bought law books. His father allowed him ^^40 a 
 year, and he had his big brother at hand to help 
 him out of debt now and again. 
 
 He was, we feel as we read, a little uneasy under 
 his brother's eye. The elder North had a disagree- 
 able fashion of putting " little contempts " upon 
 his brother, and a way of raising his own character 
 by depressing Roger's, which was hard to bear. 
 But Roger North bore it bravely; he meant stick- 
 ing to his brother, and stick he did. In five years 
 he saw Francis become King's Counsel, SoHcitor- 
 General, and then " Mr. Attorney." " If he should 
 die," writes Roger, " I am lost." But Francis 
 did not die, which was as well, for he was much 
 better suited for this world than the next. 
 
 Roger North was no great student of the law. 
 He was fond of mathematics, optics, mechanics, 
 architecture, music, and of sailing a small yacht 
 — given him by Mr. Windham, of Felbrigge^ — on 
 the Thames; and he gives in his Autobiography 
 interesting accounts of these pastimes. He was 
 very anxious indeed to get on and make money, 
 but he rehed more upon his brother than upon 
 either his own brains or his own industry. 
 
 In 1674 Francis North became Chief Justice of 
 the Common Pleas, succeeding Sir John Vaughan, 
 the friend of Selden; and Roger at once got him- 
 self called to the Bar, and thenceforward, so far 
 as possible, whenever Francis was on the Bench, 
 there was Roger pleading before him. Indeed, it 
 went much further than this. " I kept so closely 
 to him that I can safely say I saw him abed 
 every night without intermission for divers years 
 together, which enables me to contradict the 
 
 299590
 
 38 NORTH'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 
 
 malicious report a relation raised of him, that he 
 kept a mistress as the mode of that time was." The 
 morals of a Chief Justice two centuries after his 
 death having no personal concern for this genera- 
 tion, I feel free to confess that I am rather sorry 
 for Francis with Roger ever by his side in this 
 unpleasantly pertinacious fashion. The younger 
 North, so he tells us, always drove down to West- 
 minster with the Chief Justice, and he frankly 
 admits that his chief appui was his brother's 
 character, fame, and interest. Not being a Ser- 
 jeant, Roger could not actually practise in the 
 Common Pleas, but on various circuits, at the 
 Guildhall, at the Treasury, and w^herever else he 
 could lawfully go before the Chief Justice, there 
 Roger went and got a business together. He also 
 made money, sometimes as much as ^^9 a day, 
 from court-keeping — that is, attending manor 
 courts. This was a device of his elder brother's, 
 who used to practise it before he was called to 
 the Bar. It savours of pettifogging. However, it 
 seems in Roger's case to have led to his obtaining 
 the patent office of Temporal Steward to the See 
 of Canterbury, to which he had the courage to 
 stick after the deprivation of Archbishop Sancroft. 
 This dogged devotion to the Church redeems 
 North's life from a commonplaceness which would 
 otherwise be hopeless. The Archbishop left his 
 faithful steward ^^20 for a ring, but North pre- 
 ferred, like a wise man, to buy books, which he 
 had bound in the Archbishop's manner. 
 
 In 1682 Roger North " took silk," as the phrase 
 now goes, and became one of the Attorney-General's 
 devils, in which capacity his name is to be found in
 
 NORTH'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 39 
 
 the reports of the trial of Lord William Russell. 
 What he says about that trial in the Autobiography 
 is just what might be expected from an Attorney- 
 General's devil — that is, that never before was a 
 State trial conducted with such candour and fair- 
 ness. He admits that this is not the judgment of 
 the world; but then, says he, "the world never 
 did nor will understand its true good, or reward, 
 encourage, or endure its true patriots and friends." 
 
 At the end of 1683 Francis North came home 
 one night with no less remarkable a companion 
 in his coach than the Great Seal. Roger instantly 
 transposed himself to the Court of Chancery, where 
 he began coining money. " My whole study," he 
 says, " is causes and motions." He found it hard 
 work, but he buckled to, and boasts — like so many 
 of his brethren, alive as well as dead — that he, at 
 all events, always read his briefs. In the first year 
 his fees amounted to ^4000, in the second to nearly 
 as much, but in the third there was a falling 
 off, owing to a smaller quantity of business in 
 the Court. A new Lord Keeper was always the 
 occasion of the rehearing of old causes. The 
 defeated litigants wished to try their luck before 
 the new man. 
 
 North was at first astonished with the size of 
 the fees he was offered; he even refused them, 
 thinking them bribes : " but my fellow-practisers' 
 conversation soon cured me of that nicety." And 
 yet the biggest fee he ever got was twenty guineas. 
 Ten guineas was the usual fee on a " huge " brief, 
 and five " in the better sort of causes." In ordinary 
 cases Roger North would take two or three guineas, 
 and one guinea for motions and defences.
 
 40 NORTH'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 
 
 In the Long Vacations Roger still stuck to his 
 brother, who, no doubt, found him useful. Thus 
 when the Mayor, Aldermen, and Council of Ban- 
 bury came over to Wroxton to pay their respects 
 to the Lord Keeper, they were handed over to the 
 charge of Roger, who walked them all over the 
 house to show the rooms, and then made them 
 drunk at dinner " and dismissed them to their 
 lodgings in ditches homeward bound." But the 
 effort was too much for him, and no sooner were 
 they gone than he had to lie down, all on fire, upon 
 the ground, from which he rose very sick and 
 scarce recovered in some days. As a rule he was 
 a most temperate man, and hated the custom and 
 extravagance of drinking. He had not enough 
 understanding to obfuscate it by drink. 
 
 All went well with the brothers until the death 
 of Charles II. Then the horizon grew troubled — 
 but still Roger was being talked of as a Baron of 
 the Exchequer, when the Lord Keeper died on 
 September 5th, 1685. With him ended the public 
 life of his younger brother. Roger North was only 
 thirty-two. He was a King's Counsel, and in con- 
 siderable practice, but he had not the will — perhaps 
 he had not the force — to stand alone. At the 
 Revolution he became a non-juror, and retired 
 into the country. His Autobiography also ceases 
 with his brother's death. 
 
 He had much private family business to transact, 
 and in 1690 he bought the Rougham estate in Nor- 
 folk, where he carried on building and planting on 
 a considerable scale. He married and had children, 
 bought books, restored the parish church, and finally 
 died on March ist, 1734, in his eighty-first year.
 
 NORTH'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 41 
 
 Dr. Jessopp tells us very little is left of Roger 
 North — his house has been pulled down, his trees 
 pulled up, and his books dispersed. But his Lives 
 of his three brothers, and now the Autobiography 
 of himself, will keep his memory green. There is 
 something about him one rather likes, though 
 were we asked what it is, we should have no 
 answer ready.
 
 POPE 
 
 1887 
 
 THE eighteenth century has been well 
 abused by the nineteenth. So far as I 
 can gather, it is the settled practice of 
 every century to speak evil of her immediate 
 predecessor, and I have small doubt that, had 
 we gone groping about in the tenth century, we 
 should yet have been found hinting that the ninth 
 was darker than she had any need to be. 
 
 But our tone of speaking about the last century 
 has lately undergone an alteration. The fact is, 
 we are drawing near our own latter end. The Head 
 Master of Harrow lately thrilled an audience by 
 informing them that he had, that very day, en- 
 tered an existing bona fide boy upon the school 
 books, whose education, however, would not begin 
 till the twentieth century. As a parent was over- 
 heard to observe, " an illustration of that sort 
 comes home to one." The older we grow the less 
 confident we become, the readier to believe that 
 our judgments are probably wrong, and liable, and 
 even likely, to be reversed; the better disposed to 
 live and let live. The child, as Mr. Browning has 
 somewhere elaborated, cries for the moon and 
 beats its nurse, but the old man sips his gruel with 
 avidity and thanks Heaven if nobody beats him. 
 And so we have left off beating the eighteenth 
 
 42
 
 POPE 43 
 
 century. It was not so, however, in our lusty 
 prime. Carlyle, historian though he was of Fred- 
 erick the Great and the French Revolution, re- 
 venged himself for the trouble it gave him by 
 loading it with all vile epithets. If it had been a 
 cock or a cook he could not have called it harder 
 names. It was century spendthrift, fraudulent 
 bankrupt, a swindler century, which did but 
 one true action, " namely, to blow its brains 
 out in that grand universal suicide named French 
 Revolution." 
 
 The leaders of the neo-Cathohc movement very 
 properly shuddered at a century which white- 
 washed its churches and thought even monthly 
 communions affected. The ardent Liberal could 
 not but despise a century which did without the 
 franchise, and, despite the most splendid materials, 
 had no Financial Reform Almanack. The senti- 
 mental Tory found little to please him in the House 
 of Hanover and Whig domination. The lovers of 
 poetry, with Shelley in their ears and Wordsworth 
 at their hearts, made merry with the trim muses 
 of Queen Anne, with their sham pastorals, their 
 dilapidated classicism, and still more with their 
 town-bred descriptions of the country, with its 
 purling brooks and nodding groves, and, hanging 
 over all, the moon — not Shelley's " orbed maiden," 
 but " the refulgent lamp of night." And so, on 
 all hands, the poor century was weighed in a 
 hundred different balances and found wanting. It 
 lacked inspiration, unction, and generally all those 
 things for which it was thought certain the twen- 
 tieth century would commend us. But we do not 
 talk like that now. The waters of the sullen Lethe,
 
 44 POPE 
 
 rolling doom, are sounding too loudly in our own 
 ears. We would die at peace with all centuries. 
 Mr. Frederick Harrison writes a formal Defence oj 
 the Eighteenth Century. Mr. Matthew Arnold re- 
 prints half-a-dozen of Dr. Johnson's Lives oj the 
 Poets. Mr. Leslie Stephen composes a history of 
 thought during this objurgated period, and also 
 edits, in sumptuously inconvenient volumes, the 
 works of its two great novelists, Richardson and 
 Fielding; and, finally, there now trembles on the 
 very verge of completion a splendid and long- 
 laboured edition of the poems and letters of the 
 great poet of the eighteenth century, the abstract 
 and brief chronicle of his time, a man who had 
 some of its virtues and most of its vices, one 
 whom it is easy to hate, but still easier to quote — 
 Alexander Pope. 
 
 Twenty years ago the chances were that a lecture 
 on Pope began by asking the, perhaps not imper- 
 tinent, question, " Was he a poet ? " And the 
 method had its merits, for the question once asked 
 it was easy for the lecturer, like an incendiary who 
 has just fired a haystack, to steal away amidst the 
 crackhngs of a familiar controversy. It was not 
 unfitting that so quarrelsome a man as Pope 
 should have been the occasion of so much quar- 
 relsomeness in others. For long the battle waged 
 as fiercely over Pope's poetry as erst it did in his 
 own Homer over the body of the slain Patroclus. 
 Stout men took part in it, notably Lord Byron, 
 whose letters to Mr. Bowles on the subject, though 
 composed in his lordship's most ruffianly vein, still 
 make good reading — of a sort. But the battle is 
 over, at all events for the present. It is not now
 
 POPE 45 
 
 our humour to inquire too curiously about first 
 causes or primal elements. As we are not prepared 
 with a definition of poetry, we feel how impossible 
 it would be for us to deny the rank of a poet to one 
 whose lines not infrequently scan and almost always 
 rhyme. For my part, I should as soon think of 
 asking whether a centipede has legs or a wasp a 
 sting as whether the author of the Rape of the 
 Lock and the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot was or was 
 not a poet. 
 
 Pope's hfe has been described as a succession of 
 petty secrets and third-rate problems, but there 
 seems to be no doubt that it began on May 21st, 
 1688, in Lombard Street, in the city of London. 
 But this event over, mystery steps in with the 
 question, What was his father? The occupation 
 of the elder Pope occasioned nearly as fierce a con- 
 troversy as the poetical legitimacy of the younger. 
 Mahce has even hinted that old Pope was a hatter. 
 The poet, of course, knew, but wouldn't tell, being 
 always more ready, as Johnson observes, to say 
 what his father was not than what he was. He 
 denied the hatter, and said his father was of the 
 family of the Earls of Downe; but on this state- 
 ment being communicated to a relative of the poet, 
 the brutal fellow, who was probably without a 
 tincture of polite learning, said he heard of the 
 relationship for the first time ! " Hard as thy 
 heart, and as thy birth obscure," sang one of 
 Pope's too numerous enemies in the easy numbers 
 he had taught his age. It is, however, now taken 
 as settled that the elder Pope, Hke Izaak Walton 
 and John Gilpin, and many other good fellows, was 
 a hnen-draper. He made money, and one would
 
 46 POPE 
 
 like to know how he did it in the troublesome 
 times he lived in; but his books have all perished. 
 He was a Roman Catholic, as also was the poet's 
 mother, who was her husband's second wife, and 
 came out of Yorkshire. It used to be confidently 
 asserted that the elder Pope, on retiring from 
 business, which he did early in the poet's child- 
 hood, put his fortune in a box and spent it as he 
 needed it — a course of conduct the real merits of 
 which are likely to be hid from a lineal descendant. 
 Old Pope, however, did nothing of the kind, but 
 invested money in the French funds, his conscience 
 not allowing him to do so in the English, and he 
 also lent sums on bond to fellow Catholics, one of 
 whom used to remit him his half-year's interest 
 calculated at the rate of ^4 per cent, per annum, 
 whereas by the terms of the bond he was to pay 
 j^4^ per cent, per annum. On another occasion the 
 same borrower deducted from the interest accrued 
 due a pound he said he had lent the youthful poet. 
 These things annoyed the old gentleman, as they 
 would most old gentlemen of my acquaintance. 
 The poet was the only child of his mother, and a 
 queerly constituted mortal he was. Dr. Johnson 
 has recorded the long list of his infirmities with an 
 almost chilling bluntness; but alas! so malformed 
 was Pope's character, so tortuous and twisted were 
 his ways, so elaborately artificial and detestably 
 petty many of his devices, that it is not malice 
 but charity that bids us remember that, during his 
 whole maturity, he could neither dress nor undress 
 himself, go to bed or get up without help, and that 
 on rising he had to be invested into a stiff canvas 
 bodice and tightly laced, and have put on him a
 
 POPE 47 
 
 fur doublet and numerous stockings to keep off 
 the cold and fill out his shrunken form. If ever 
 there was a man whose life was one long provoca- 
 tion that man was the author of the Dunciad. Pope 
 had no means of self-defence save his wit. Dr. 
 Johnson was a queer fellow enough, having in- 
 herited, as he tells us, a vile melancholy from his 
 father, and he certainly was no Adonis to look at, 
 but those who laughed at him were careful to do 
 so behind his gigantic back. When a rapacious 
 bookseller insulted him he knocked him down. 
 When the caricaturist Foote threatened to take 
 him off upon the stage, the most Christian of 
 lexicographers caused it to be intimated to him 
 that if he did the author of Rasselas would thrash 
 him in the public street, and the buffoon desisted. 
 " Did not Foote," asked Boswell, " think of exhi- 
 biting you, sir ? " and our great moralist replied, 
 " Sir, fear restrained him, he knew I would have 
 broken his bones." When he denounced Macpher- 
 son for his Ossian frauds, and the irate Celt said 
 something about personal chastisement, Johnson 
 told him, in writing, that he was not to be deterred 
 from detecting a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian, 
 and by way of a temporary provision for his self- 
 defence selected a most grievous cudgel, six feet 
 in height, and terminating in a head (once the root) 
 of the size of a large orange. The possession of 
 great physical strength is no mean assistance to a 
 straightforward life. The late Professor Fawcett, 
 who, though blind, delighted, arm-in-arm with a 
 friend, to skate furiously on the fens, never could be 
 brought to share the fears entertained on his behalf 
 by some of the less stalwart of his acquaintances.
 
 48 POPE 
 
 " Why," he used to exclaim apologetically, " even 
 if I do run up against anybody, it is always 
 the other fellow who gets the worst of it." But 
 Pope, whom a child could hustle, had no such 
 resources. We should always remember this, it 
 is brutal to forget it. 
 
 Pope's parents found in their only son the voca- 
 tion of their later life. He might be anything he 
 liked. Did he lisp in numbers, the boyish rhymes 
 were duly scanned and criticised; had he a turn 
 for painting, lessons were provided. He might be 
 anything he chose, and everything by turns. Many 
 of us have been lately reading chapters from the 
 life of another only son, and though the comparison 
 may not bear working out, still, that there were 
 points of strong similarity between the days of the 
 youthful poet at Binfield and those of Ruskin at 
 Heme Hill may be suspected. Pope's education 
 was, of course, private, for a double reason — his 
 proscribed faith and his frail form. Mr. LesHe 
 Stephen, with a touching faith in public schools, 
 has the hardihood to regret that it was obviously 
 impossible to send Pope to Westminster. One 
 shudders at the thought. It could only have ended 
 in an inquest. As it was, the poor little cripple was 
 whipped at Twyford for lampooning his master. 
 Pope was extraordinarily sensitive. Cruelty to 
 animals he abhorred. Every kind of sport, from 
 spinning cockchafers to coursing hares, he held in 
 loathing, and one cannot but be thankful that the 
 childhood of this supersensitive poet was shielded 
 from the rufhanism of the nether world of boys as 
 that brood then existed. Westminster had not 
 long to wait for Cowper. Pope was taught his
 
 POPE 49 
 
 rudiments by stray priests and at small seminaries, 
 where, at all events, he had his bent, and escaped 
 the contagious error that Homer wrote in Greek 
 in order that English boys might be beaten. Of 
 course he did not become a scholar. Had he done 
 so he probably would not have translated Homer, 
 though he might have lectured on how not to do 
 it. Indeed, the only evidence we have that Pope 
 knew Greek at all is that he translated Homer, 
 and was accustomed to carry about with him a 
 small pocket edition of the bard in the original. 
 Latin he could probably read with decent comfort, 
 though it is noticeable that if he had occasion to 
 refer to a Latin book, and there was a French 
 translation, he preferred the latter version to the 
 original. Voltaire, who knew Pope, asserts that 
 he could not speak a word of French, and could 
 hardly read it; but Voltaire was not a truthful 
 man, and on one occasion told lies in an affidavit. 
 The fact is. Pope's curiosity was too inordinate — 
 his desire to know everything all at once too strong 
 to admit of the delay of learning a foreign language; 
 and he was consequently a reader of translations, 
 and he lived in an age of translations. He was, as 
 a boy, a simply ferocious reader, and was early 
 acquainted with the contents of the great poets, 
 both of antiquity and the modern world. His 
 studies, at once intense, prolonged, and exciting, 
 injured his feeble health, and made him the Hfe- 
 long sufferer he was. It was a noble zeal, and 
 arose from the immense interest Pope ever took 
 in human things. 
 
 From 1700 to 1715, that is, from his fourteenth 
 to his twenty-ninth year, he Hved with his father
 
 50 POPE 
 
 and mother at Binfield, on the borders of Windsor 
 Forest, which he made the subject of one of his 
 early poems, against which it was alleged, with 
 surely some force, that it has nothing distinctive 
 about it, and might as easily have been written 
 about any other forest; to which, however. Dr. 
 Johnson characteristically replied that the onus 
 lay upon the critic of first proving that there is 
 anything distinctive about Windsor Forest,, which 
 personally he doubted, one green field in the 
 Doctor's opinion being just like another. In 
 1 71 5 Pope moved with his parents to Chiswick, 
 where in 171 7 his father, aged seventy-five, died. 
 The following year the poet again moved with his 
 mother to the celebrated villa at Twickenham, 
 where in 1733 she died, in her ninety-third year. 
 Ten years later Pope's long disease, his life, came 
 to its appointed end. His poetical dates may be 
 briefly summarised thus: his Pastorals, 1709; the 
 Essay on Criticism, 1 7 1 1 ; the first version of the 
 Rape of the Lock, 1712; the second, 1714; the 
 Iliad, begun in 171 5, was finished 1720; Eloisa, 
 ijij'-, the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate 
 Lady and the Dunciad, 1728; the Essay on Man, 
 1732; and then the Epistles and Satires. Of all 
 Pope's biographers, Dr. Johnson is still, and will 
 probably ever remain, the best. The life indeed, 
 like the rest of the Lives of the Poets, is a lazy 
 performance. It is not the strenuous work of a 
 young author eager for fame. When Johnson sat 
 down, at the instance of the London booksellers, 
 to write the lives of those poets whose works 
 his employers thought it well to publish, he had 
 long been an author at grass, and had no mind
 
 POPE 51 
 
 whatever again to wear the collar. He had great 
 reading and an amazing memory, and those were 
 at the service of the trade. The facts he knew, or 
 which were brought to his door, he recorded, but 
 research was not in his way. Was he not already 
 endowed — with a pension, which, with his cus- 
 tomary indifference to attack, he wished were 
 twice as large, in order that his enemies might 
 make twice as much fuss over it ? None the less 
 — nay, perhaps all the more — for being written 
 with so little effort, the Lives of the Poets are 
 delightful reading, and Pope's is one of the very 
 best of them.^ None knew the infirmities of 
 ordinary human nature better than Johnson. 
 They neither angered him nor amused him; he 
 neither storms, sneers, nor chuckles as he records 
 man's vanity, insincerity, jealousy, and pretence. 
 It is with a placid pen he pricks the bubble fame, 
 dishonours the overdrawn sentiment, burlesques 
 the sham philosophy of life; but for generosity, 
 friendliness, affection, he is always on the watch, 
 whilst talent and achievement never fail to win 
 his admiration; he being ever eager to repay, as 
 best he could, the debt of gratitude surely due to 
 those who have taken pains to please, and who 
 have left behind them in a world, which rarely 
 treated them kindly, works fitted to stir youth to 
 emulation, or solace the disappointments of age. 
 And over all man's manifold infirmities he throws 
 benignantly the mantle of his stately style. Pope's 
 
 * Not Horace Walpole's opinion. " Sir Joshua Reynolds has lent 
 me Dr. Johnson's Life of Pope, which Sir Joshua holds to be a 
 chef d'osuvre. It is a most trumpery performance, and stuffed with 
 all his crabbed phrases and vulgarisms, and much trash as anec- 
 dotes." — Letters, vol. viii. p 26.
 
 52 POPE 
 
 domestic virtues were not likely to miss Johnson's 
 approbation. Of them he writes: 
 
 The filial piety of Pope was in the highest degree amiable 
 and exemplary. His parents had the happiness of living till 
 he was at the summit of poetical reputation — till he was 
 at ease in his fortune, and without a rival in his fame, and 
 found no diminution of his respect or tenderness. Whatever 
 was his pride, to them he was obedient; and whatever was 
 his irritability^ to them he was gentle. Life has, amongst 
 its soothing and quiet comforts, few things better to give 
 than such a son. 
 
 To attempt to state in other words a paragraph 
 like this would be indelicate, as bad as defacing a 
 tombstone, or rewriting a collect. 
 
 Pope has had many editors, but the last edition 
 will probably long hold the field. It is more than 
 sixty years since the original John Murray, of 
 Albemarle Street, determined, with the approval 
 of his most distinguished client Lord Byron, to 
 bring out a library edition of Pope. The task was 
 first entrusted to Croker, the man whom Lord 
 Macaulav hated more than he did cold boiled 
 veal, and whose edition, had it seen the hght in 
 the great historian's lifetime, w^ould have been, 
 whatever its merits, well basted in the Edinburgh 
 Review. But Croker seems to have made no 
 real progress; for though occasionally advertised 
 amongst Mr. Murray's list of forthcoming works, 
 the first volume did not make its appearance until 
 1 87 1, fourteen years after Croker's death. The new 
 editor was the Rev. Whitwell Elwin, a clergyman 
 with many qualifications for the task, — ^patient, 
 sensible, not too fluent, but an intense hater of 
 Pope. " To be wroth with one you love," sings 
 Coleridge, " doth work Hke madness in the brain "; 
 and to edit in numerous volumes the works of a
 
 POPE 53 
 
 man you cordially dislike and always mistrust has 
 something of the same effect, whilst it is certainly 
 hard measure on the poor fellow edited. His lot 
 — if I may venture upon a homely comparison 
 founded upon a lively reminiscence of childhood 
 — resembles that of an unfortunate infant being 
 dressed by an angry nurse, in whose malicious 
 hands the simplest operations of the toilet, to say 
 nothing of the severer processes of the tub, can 
 easily be made the vehicles of no mean torture. 
 Good cause can be shown for hating Pope if you 
 are so minded, but it is something of a shame to 
 hate him and edit him too. The Rev. Mr. Elwin 
 unravels the web of Pope's follies with too rough 
 a hand for myhking; and he was, besides, far too 
 apt to believe his poet in the wrong simply because 
 somebody has said he was. For example, he reprints 
 without comment De Quincey's absurd strictures on 
 the celebrated lines — 
 
 Who but must laugh if such a man there be ? 
 Who would not weep if Atticus were he ? 
 
 De Quincey found these hnes unintelligible, and 
 pulls them about in all directions but the right one. 
 The ordinary reader never felt any difficulty. How- 
 ever, Mr. Elwin kept it up till old age overtook him, 
 and now Mr. Courthope reigns in his stead. Mr. 
 Courthope, it is easy to see, would have told a very 
 different tale had he been in command from the 
 first, for he keeps sticking in a good word for the 
 crafty little poet whenever he decently can. And 
 this is how it should be. Mr. Courthope's Life, 
 which will be the concluding volume of Mr. Murray's 
 edition, is certain to be a fascinating book. 
 
 It is Pope's behaviour about his letters that is
 
 54 POPE 
 
 now found peculiarly repellent. Acts of diseased 
 egotism sometimes excite an indignation which 
 injurious crimes fail to arouse. 
 
 The whole story is too long to be told, and is 
 by this time tolerably familiar. Here, however, is 
 part of it. In early life Pope began writing letters, 
 bits of pompous insincerity, as indeed the letters 
 of clever boys generally are, to men old enough to 
 be his grandparents, who had been struck by his 
 precocity and anticipated his fame; and being 
 always master of his own time, and passionately 
 fond of composition, he kept up the habit so 
 formed, and wrote his letters as one might fancy 
 the celebrated Blair composing his sermons, with 
 much solemnity, very slowly, and without emotion. 
 A packet of these letters addressed to a gentleman 
 owning the once proud name of Cromwell, and who 
 was certainly " guiltless of his country's blood," — 
 for all that is now known of him is that he used to 
 go hunting in a tie-wig — ^had been given by that 
 gentleman to a lady with whom he had relations, 
 who being, as will sometimes happen, a little 
 pressed for money, sold them for ten guineas to 
 Edmund Curll, a bold pirate of a bookseller and 
 publisher, upon whose head every kind of abuse 
 has been heaped, not only by the authors whom 
 he actually pillaged, by but succeeding generations 
 of penmen who never took his wages, but none the 
 less revile his name. He was a wily ruffian. In the 
 year 1727 he was condemned by His Majesty's 
 judges to stand in the pillory at Charing Cross for 
 publishing a libel, and thither doubtless, at the 
 appointed hour, many poor authors flocked, with 
 their pockets full of the bad eggs that should have
 
 POPE 55 
 
 made their breakfasts, eager to wreak vengeance 
 upon their employer; but a printer in the pillory- 
 has advantages over other traders, and Curll had 
 caused handbills to be struck off and distributed 
 amongst the crowd, stating, with his usual effron- 
 tery, that he was put in the pillory for vindicating 
 the blessed memory of Her late Majesty Queen 
 Anne. This either touched or tickled the mob — it 
 does not matter which — ^who protected Curll whilst 
 he stood on high from further outrage, and when 
 his penance was over bore him on their shoulders 
 to an adjacent tavern, where (it is alleged) he got 
 right royally drunk. ^ Ten years earlier, those 
 pleasant youths, the Westminster scholars, had got 
 hold of him, tossed him in a blanket, and beat him. 
 This was the man who bought Pope's letters to 
 Cromwell for ten guineas, and published them. 
 Pope, oddly enough, though very angry, does not 
 seem on this occasion to have moved the Court of 
 Chancery, as he subsequently did against the same 
 publisher, for an injunction to restrain the vending 
 of the volume. Indeed, until his suit in 1741, when 
 he obtained an injunction against Curll, restraining 
 the sale of a volume containing some of his letters 
 to Swift, the right of the writer of a letter to forbid 
 its publication had never been established, and the 
 view that a letter was a gift to the receiver had 
 received some countenance. But Pope had so 
 much of the true temper of a litigant, and so loved 
 a nice point, that he might have been expected to 
 raise the question on the first opportunity. He, 
 however, did not do so, and the volume had a 
 considerable sale — a fact not likely to be lost sight 
 
 ' Howell's State Trials, vol. xvii. p. 159.
 
 56 POPE 
 
 of by so keen an author as Pope, to whom the 
 thought occurred, " Could I only recover all my 
 letters, and get them published, I should be as 
 famous in prose as I am in rhyme." His communi- 
 cations with his friends now begin to be full of the 
 miscreant Curll, against whose machinations and 
 guineas no letters were proof. Have them Curll 
 would, and publish them he would, to the sore 
 injury of the writer's feelings. The only way to 
 avoid this outrage upon the privacy of true friend- 
 ship was for all the letters to be returned to the 
 writer, who had arranged for them to be received 
 by a great nobleman, against whose strong boxes 
 Curll might rage and surge in vain. Pope's friends 
 did not at first quite catch his drift. " You need 
 give yourself no trouble," wrote Swift, though at 
 a later date than the transaction I am now de- 
 scribing; " everyone of your letters shall be burnt." 
 But that was not what Pope wanted. The first 
 letters he recovered were chiefly those he had 
 written to Mr. Caryll, a Roman Catholic gentleman 
 of character. Mr. Caryll parted with his letters 
 with some reluctance, and even suspicion, and was 
 at the extraordinary pains of causing them all to 
 be transcribed; in a word, he kept copies, and 
 said nothing about it. Now it is that Pope set 
 about as paltry a job as ever engaged the attention 
 of a man of genius. He proceeded to manufacture 
 a sham correspondence; he garbled and falsified 
 to his heart's content. He took a bit of one letter 
 and tagged it on to a bit of another letter, and out 
 of these two foreign parts made up an imaginary 
 letter, never really written to anybody, and which 
 he addressed to Mr. Addison, who was dead, or to
 
 POPE 57 
 
 whom else he chose. He did this without much 
 regard to anything except the manufacture of 
 something which he thought would read well, and 
 exhibit himself in an amiable light and in a sweet, 
 unpremeditated strain. This done, the little poet 
 destroyed the originals, and deposited one copy, as 
 he said he was going to do, in the library of the 
 Earl of Oxford, whose permission so to do he sought 
 with much solemnity, the nobleman replying with 
 curtness that any parcel Mr. Pope chose to send to 
 his butler should be taken care of. So far good. 
 The next thing was to get the letters pubhshed 
 from the copy he had retained for his own use. His 
 vanity and love of intrigue forbad him doing so 
 directly, and he bethought himself of his enemy, 
 the piratical Curll, with whom, there can now be 
 no reasonable doubt, he opened a sham correspond- 
 ence under the initials " P. T." " P. T." was made 
 to state that he had letters in his possession of Mr. 
 Pope's, who had done him some disservice, which 
 letters he was willing to let Curll publish. Curll was 
 as wily as Pope, to whom he at once wrote, and told 
 him what " P. T." was offering him. Pope replied 
 by an advertisement in a newspaper, denying the 
 existence of any such letters. " P. T.," however, 
 still kept it up, and a mysterious person was intro- 
 duced as a go-between, wearing a clergyman's wig 
 and lawyer's bands. Curll at last advertised as 
 forthcoming an edition of Mr. Pope's letters to, 
 and, as the advertisement certainly ran, from, 
 divers noblemen and gentlemen. Pope affected 
 the utmost fury, and set the House of Lords upon 
 the printer for threatening to publish peers' letters 
 without their leave. Curll, however, had a tongue
 
 58 POPE 
 
 in his head, and easily satisfied a committee of 
 their Lordships' House that this was a mistake, 
 and that no noblemen's letters were included in 
 the intended publication, the unbound sheets of 
 which he produced. The House of Lords, somewhat 
 mystified and disgusted, gave the matter up, and 
 the letters came out in 1735. Pope raved, but the 
 judicious even then opined that he protested some- 
 what too much. He promptly got a bookseller to 
 pirate Curll's edition — a proceeding on his part 
 which struck Curll as the unkindest cut of all, and 
 flagrantly dishonest. He took proceedings against 
 Pope's publisher, but what came of the litigation 
 I cannot say. 
 
 The Caryll copy of the correspondence as it 
 actually existed, after long remaining in manu- 
 script, has been published, and we have now the 
 real letters and the sham letters side by side. The 
 effect is grotesquely disgusting. For example, on 
 September 20th, 171 3, Pope undoubtedly wrote 
 to Caryll as follows: 
 
 I have been just taking a walk in St. James's Park, full of 
 the reflections of the transitory nature of all human delights, 
 and giving my thoughts a loose into the contemplation of 
 those sensations of satisfaction which probably we may taste 
 in the more exalted company of separate spirits, when we 
 range the starry walks above and gaze on the world at a vast 
 distance, as now we do on those. 
 
 Poor Stuff enough, one would have thought. On 
 re-reading this letter Pope was so pleased with his 
 moonshine that he transferred the whole passage 
 to an imaginary letter, to which he gave the, of 
 course fictitious, date of February loth, 171 5, and 
 addressed to Mr. Blount; so that, as the corre- 
 spondence now stands, you first get the Caryll
 
 POPE 59 
 
 letter of 1713, " I have been just taking a solitary 
 walk by moonshine," and so on about the starry 
 walks; and then you get the Blount letter of 171 5, 
 " I have been just taking a solitary walk by moon- 
 shine " ; and go on to find Pope refilled with his 
 reflections as before. Mr. Elwin does not, you may 
 be sure, fail to note how unlucky Pope was in his 
 second date, February loth, 1715; that being a 
 famous year, when the Thames was frozen over, 
 and as the thaw set in on the 9th, and the streets 
 were impassable even for strong men, a tender 
 morsel hke Pope was hardly likely to be out after 
 dark. But, of course, when Pope concocted the 
 Blount letter in 1735, and gave it any date he 
 chose, he could not be expected to carry in his 
 head what sort of night it was on any particu- 
 lar day in February twenty years before. It is 
 ever dangerous to tamper with written documents 
 which have been out of your sole and exclusive 
 possession even for a few minutes. 
 
 A letter Pope published as having been addressed 
 to Addison is made up of fragments of three letters 
 actually written to Caryll. Another imaginary 
 letter to Addison contains the following not inapt 
 passage from a letter to Caryll : 
 
 Good God ! what an incongruous animal is man ! how 
 unsettled in his best part, his soul, and how changing and 
 variable in his frame of body. What is man altogether but 
 one mighty inconsistency ? 
 
 What, indeed! The method subsequently em- 
 ployed by Pope to recover his letters from Swift, 
 and to get them published in such a way as to 
 create the impression that Pope himself had no 
 hand in it, cannot be here narrated. It is a story
 
 6o POPE 
 
 no one can take pleasure In. Of such an organised 
 hypocrisy as this correspondence it is no man's 
 duty to speak seriously. Here and there an amusing 
 letter occurs, but as a whole it is neither interesting, 
 elevating, nor amusing. When in 1741 Curll moved 
 to dissolve the injunction Pope had obtained in 
 connection with the Swift correspondence, his 
 counsel argued that letters on familiar subjects 
 and containing inquiries after the health of friends 
 were not learned works, and consequently were not 
 within the copyright statute of Queen Anne, which 
 was entitled, " An Act for the Encouragement of 
 Learning "; but Lord Hardwicke, with his accus- 
 tomed good sense, would have none of this objec- 
 tion, and observed (and these remarks, being 
 necessary for the judgment, are not mere obiter 
 dicta, but conclusive): 
 
 It is certain that no works have done more service to 
 mankind than those which have appeared in this shape upon 
 famihar subjects, and which, perhaps, were never intended 
 to be published; and it is this which makes them so vahiable, 
 for I must confess, for my own part, that letters which are 
 very elaborately written, and originally intended for the 
 press, are generally the most insignificant, and very little 
 worth any person's reading (2 Atkyns, p. 357). 
 
 I am encouraged by this authority to express 
 the unorthodox opinion that Pope's letters, with 
 scarcely half-a-dozen exceptions, and only one 
 notable exception, are very little worth any 
 person's reading. 
 
 Pope's epistolary pranks have, perhaps, done 
 him some injustice. It has always been the fashion 
 to admire the letter which, first appearing in 1737, 
 in Pope's correspondence, and there attributed to 
 Gay, describes the death by lightning of the rustic
 
 POPE 6i 
 
 lovers John Hewet and Sarah Drew. An identical 
 description occurring in a letter written by Pope 
 to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and subsequently 
 published by Warton from the original, naturally 
 caused the poet to be accused of pilfering another 
 man's letter, and sending it off as his own. Mr. 
 Thackeray so puts it in his world-famous Lectures^ 
 and few literary anecdotes are wider known; but 
 the better opinion undoubtedly is that the letter 
 was Pope's from the beginning, and attributed by 
 him to Gay because he did not want to have it 
 appear that on the date in question he was corre- 
 sponding with Lady Mary. After all, there is a 
 great deal to be said in favour of honesty. 
 
 When we turn from the man to the poet we have 
 at once to change our key. A cleverer fellow than 
 Pope never commenced author. He was in his own 
 mundane way as determined to be a poet, and the 
 best going, as John Milton himself. He took pains 
 to be splendid — he polished and pruned. His first 
 draft never reached the printer — though he some- 
 times said it did. This ought, I think, to endear 
 him to us in these hasty days, when authors high 
 and low think nothing of emptying the slops of 
 their minds over their readers, without so much 
 as a cry of " Heads below," 
 
 Pope's translation of the Iliad was his first great 
 undertaking, and he worked at it like a Trojan. It 
 was published by subscription for two guineas; 
 that is, the first part was. His friends were set to 
 work to collect subscribers. Caryll alone got thirty- 
 eight. Pope fully entered into this. He was always 
 alive to the value of his wares, and despised the 
 foppery of those of his Hterary friends who would
 
 62 POPE 
 
 not make money out of their books, but would do 
 so out of their country. He writes to Caryll: 
 
 But I am in good earnest of late, too much a man of business 
 to mind metaphors and similes. I find subscribing much 
 superior to writing, and there is a sort of little epigram I more 
 especially delight in, after the manner of rondeaus, which 
 begin and end all in the same words, namely — " Received " 
 and " A. Pope." These epigrams end smartly, and each of 
 them are tagged with two guineas. Of these, as I have learnt, 
 you have composed several ready for me to set my name to. 
 
 This is certainly much better than that trumpery 
 walk in the moonshine. Pope had not at this time 
 joined the Tories, and both parties subscribed. He 
 cleared over 3^5,000 by the Iliad. Over the Odyssey 
 he slackened, and employed two inferior wits to do 
 half the books; but even after paying his journey- 
 men he made nearly £4,000 over the Odyssey. Well 
 might he write in later life: 
 
 Since, thanks to Homer, I do live and thrive. 
 
 Pope was amongst the first of prosperous authors, 
 and heads the clan of cunning fellows who have 
 turned their lyrical cry into consols, and their odes 
 into acres. 
 
 Of the merits of this great work it is not necessary 
 to speak at length. Mr. Edmund Yates tells a 
 pleasant story of how one day when an old school 
 Homer lay on his table, Shirley Brooks sauntered 
 in, and taking the book up laid it down again, 
 dryly observing, "Ah! I see you have Horner^ s 
 Iliadl Well, I beheve it is the best." And so it is. 
 Homer's Iliad is the best, and Pope's Homer^s 
 Iliad is the second best. Whose is the third best 
 is controversy. 
 
 Pope knew next to no Greek, but then he did not
 
 POPE 63 
 
 work upon the Greek text. He had Chapman's 
 translation ever at his elbow, also the version of 
 John Ogilby, which had appeared in 1660 — a 
 splendid folio, with illustrations by the celebrated 
 Hollar. Dryden had not got farther than the first 
 book of the Iliad, and a fragment of the sixth book. 
 A faithful rendering of the exact sense of Homer 
 is not, of course, to be looked for. In the first book 
 Pope describes the captive maid Briseis as looking 
 back. In Homer she does not look back, but in 
 Dryden she does; and Pope followed Dryden, and 
 did not look, at all events, any farther back. 
 
 But what really is odd is that in Cowper's 
 translation Briseis looks back too. Now, Cowper 
 had been to a public school, and consequently 
 knew Greek, and made it his special boast that, 
 though dull, he was faithful. It is easy to make 
 fun of Pope's version, but true scholars have 
 seldom done so. Listen to Professor Conington : ^ 
 
 It has been, and I hope still is, the delight of every in- 
 telligent schoolboy. They read of kings, and heroes, and mighty 
 deeds in language which, in its calm majestic flow, unhast- 
 ing, unresting, carries them on as irresistibly as Homer's own 
 could do were they born readers of Greek, and their minds are 
 filled with a conception of the heroic age, not indeed strictly 
 true, but almost as near the truth as that which was enter- 
 tained by Virgil himself. 
 
 Mr. D. G. Rossetti, himself both an admirable 
 translator and a distinguished poet, has in effect 
 laid down the first law of rhythmical translation 
 thus : " Thou shalt not turn a good poem into a 
 bad one." Pope kept this law. 
 
 Pope was a great adept at working upon other 
 men's stuff. There is hardly anything in which 
 
 ' In Oxford Essays for 1858.
 
 64 POPE 
 
 men differ more enormously than in the degree 
 in which they possess this faculty of utilisation. 
 Pope's Essay on Criticism, which brought him 
 great fame, and was thought a miracle of wit, 
 was the result of much hasty reading, undertaken 
 with the intention of appropriation. Apart from 
 the limes labor, which was enormous, and was 
 never grudged by Pope, there was not an hour's 
 really hard work in it. Dryden had begun the 
 work of English criticism with his Essay on Dramatic 
 Poesy, and other well-known pieces. He had also 
 translated Boileau's Art of Poetry. Then there 
 were the works of those noble lords. Lord Sheffield, 
 Lord Roscommon, Lord Granville, and the Duke 
 of Buckingham. Pope, who loved a brief, read all 
 these books greedily, and with an amazing quick 
 eye for points. His orderly brain and brilliant wit 
 re-arranged and rendered resplendent the ill-placed 
 and ill-set thoughts of other men. 
 
 The same thing is noticeable in the most 
 laboured production of his later life, the cele- 
 brated Essay on Man.^ For this he was coached 
 by Lord Bolingbroke. 
 
 Pope was accustomed to talk with much 
 solemnity of his ethical system, of which the 
 Essay on Man is but a fragment, but we need 
 not trouble ourselves about it. Dr. Johnson said 
 about Clarissa Harlozve that the man who read it 
 for the story might hang himself; so we may say 
 about the poetry of Pope: the man who reads it 
 for its critical or ethical philosophy may hang 
 
 ' The Essay on Man was written in the cedar-panelled room 
 overlooking the Thames at Battersea, still preserved in Mayhew's 
 flour mills.
 
 POPE 65 
 
 himself. We read Pope for pleasure, but a bit of 
 his philosophy may be given: 
 
 Presumptuous man ! the reason wouldst thou find, 
 Why formed so weak, so httle, and so Wind ? 
 First, if thou canst, the harder reason guess 
 Why formed no weaker, bhnder, and no less ? 
 Ask of thy mother Earth why oaks are made 
 Taller and stronger than the weeds they shade ! 
 Or ask of yonder argent fields above 
 Why Jove's satellites are less than Jove! 
 
 To this latter interrogatory presumptuous science, 
 speaking through the mouth of Voltaire, was ready 
 with an answer. If Jupiter were less than his 
 satellites they wouldn't go round him. Pope can 
 make no claim to be a philosopher, and had he 
 been one, verse would have been a most improper 
 vehicle to convey his speculations. No one willingly 
 fights in handcuffs or wrestles to music. For a man 
 with novel truths to promulgate, or grave moral 
 laws to expound, to postpone doing so until he 
 had hitched them into rhyme would be to insult 
 his mission. Pope's gifts were his wit, his swift- 
 working mind, added to all the cunning of the 
 craft and mystery of composition. He could say 
 things better than other men, and hence it comes 
 that, be he a great poet or a small one, he is a 
 great writer, an English classic. What is it that 
 constitutes a great writer ? A bold question, 
 certainly, but whenever anyone asks himself a 
 question in public you may be certain he has 
 provided himself with an answer. I find mine in 
 the writings of a distinguished neighbour of yours, ^ 
 himself, though living, an English classic — Cardinal 
 Newman. He says : ^ 
 
 ' This lecture was delivered at Birmingham. 
 ^ Lectures and Essays on University Subjects; Lecture on Literature. 
 I E
 
 66 POPE 
 
 " I do not claim for a great author, as such, any 
 great depth of thought, or breadth of view, or 
 philosophy, or sagacity, or knowledge of human 
 nature, or experience of human life — though these 
 additional gifts he may have, and the more he has 
 of them the greater he is, — but I ascribe to him, as 
 his characteristic gift, in a large sense, the faculty 
 of expression. He is master of the two-fold Ao'yos, 
 the thought and the word, distinct but inseparable 
 from each other. . . . He always has the right 
 word for the right idea, and never a word too 
 much. If he is brief it is because few words suffice; 
 if he is lavish of them, still each word has its mark, 
 and aids, not embarrasses, the vigorous march of 
 his elocution. He expresses what all feel, but all 
 cannot say, and his sayings pass into proverbs 
 amongst his people, and his phrases become house- 
 hold words and idioms of their daily speech, which is 
 tessellated with the rich fragments of his language, 
 as we see in foreign lands the marbles of Roman 
 grandeur worked into the walls and pavements of 
 modern palaces." Pope satisfies this definition. 
 He has been dead one hundred and forty-two 
 years; yet, next to Shakespeare, who has been 
 dead two hundred and seventy years, and who 
 was nearer to Pope than Pope is to us, he is the 
 most quoted of English poets, the one who has 
 most enriched our common speech. Horace used, 
 but has long ceased, to be the poet of Parliament; 
 for the late Prime Minister, who, more than any 
 other, has kept ahve in Parliament the scholarly 
 traditions of the past, has never been very Hora- 
 tian, preferring, whenever the dignity of the 
 occasion seemed to demand Latin, the long roll
 
 POPE e,^ 
 
 of the hexameter, something out of Virgil or 
 Lucretius. The new generation of honourable 
 members might not unprofitably turn their atten- 
 tion to Pope. Think how, at all events, the labour 
 members would applaud, not with a " sad civility," 
 but with downright cheers, a quotation they 
 actually understood. 
 
 Pope is seen at his best in his satires and epistles, 
 and in the mock-heroic. To say that the Rape 
 of the Lock is the best mock-heroic poem in the 
 language is to say nothing; to say that it is the 
 best in the world is to say more than my reading 
 warrants ; but to say that it and Paradise Regained 
 are the only two faultless poems, of any length, in 
 English is to say enough. 
 
 The satires are savage — ^perhaps satires should 
 be; but Pope's satires are sometimes what satires 
 should never be — shrill. Dr. Johnson is more to 
 my mind as a sheer satirist than Pope, for in 
 satire character tells more than in any other form 
 of verse. We want a personality behind — 3. strong, 
 gloomy, brooding personality; soured and savage 
 if you will — nay, as soured and savage as you like, 
 but spiteful never. 
 
 Pope became rather by the backing of his 
 friends than from any other cause a party man. 
 Party feeling ran high during the first Georges, 
 and embraced things now outside its ambit — the 
 theatre, for example, and the opera. You remem- 
 ber how excited politicians got over Addison's 
 Cato, which, as the work of a Whig, and appearing 
 at a critical time, was thought to be full of a 
 wicked wit and a subtle innuendo future ages 
 have failed to discover amidst its obvious dullness.
 
 68 POPE 
 
 Pope, who was not then connected with either 
 party, wrote the prologue, and in one of the best 
 letters ever written to nobody tells the story of 
 the first night. 
 
 The numerous and violent claps of the Wliig party, on the 
 one side the theatre, were echoed back by the Tories on the 
 other, while the author sweated behind the scenes with con- 
 cern to find their applause proceeded more from the hand 
 than the head. This was the case too of the prologue- writer, 
 who was clapped into a stanch Whig, sore against his will, 
 at almost every two lines. I believe that you have heard that, 
 after all the applause of the opposite faction, my Lord Boling- 
 broke sent for Booth, who played Cato, into the box between 
 one of the acts, and presented him with fifty guineas, in 
 acknowledgment, as he expressed it, for his defending the 
 cause of liberty so well against a perpetual dictator. The 
 Whigs are unwilling to be distanced this way, as it is said, 
 and, therefore, design a present to the said Cato very speedily. 
 In the meantime they are getting ready as good a sentence 
 as the former on their side. So, betwixt them, it is probable 
 that Cato, as Dr. Garth expressed it, may have something 
 to live upon after he dies. 
 
 Later on music was dragged into the fray. The 
 Court was all for Handel and the Germans; the 
 Prince of Wales and the Tory nobility affected the 
 Italian opera. The Whigs went to the Haymarket; 
 the Tories to the Opera House in Lincoln's Inn 
 Field. In this latter strife Pope took no part; for, 
 notwithstanding his Ode on St. Cecilia's Day, he 
 hated music with an entire sincerity. He also 
 affected to hate the drama ; but some have thought 
 this accounted for by the fact that, early in his 
 career, he was damned for the farce of Three Hours 
 After Marriage, which, after the fashion of our own 
 days, he concocted with another, the co-author in 
 this case being a wit of no less calibre than Gay, 
 the author of The Beggar^ s Opera. The astonished 
 audience bore it as best they might till the last act,
 
 POPE 69 
 
 when the two lovers, having first inserted them- 
 selves respectively into the skins of a mummy and 
 a crocodile, talk at one another across the boards; 
 then they rose in their rage, and made an end of 
 that farce. Their yells were doubtless still in 
 Pope's ears when, long afterwards, he wrote the 
 fine lines : 
 
 While all its throats the gallery extends. 
 And all the thunder of the pit ascends, 
 Loud as the wolves on Orca's stormy steep 
 Howl to the roarings of the northern deep. 
 
 Pope, as we have said, became a partisan, and 
 so had his hands full of ready-made quarrels; but 
 his period was certainly one that demanded a 
 satirist. Perhaps most periods do; but I am 
 content to repeat, his did. Satire like Pope's is 
 essentially modish, and requires a restricted range. 
 Were anyone desirous of satirising humanity at 
 large I should advise him to check his noble rage, 
 and, at all events, to begin with his next-door 
 neighbour, who is almost certain to resent it, 
 which humanity will not do. This was Pope's 
 method. It was a corrupt set amongst whom he 
 moved. The gambling in the South Sea stock had 
 been prodigious, and high and low, married and 
 single, town and country, Protestant and Catholic, 
 Whig and Tory, took part in it. One could gamble 
 in that stock. The mania began in February 1720, 
 and by the end of May the price of j^ioo stock was 
 up to ;^340. In July and August it was ^^950, and 
 even touched ^1000. In the middle of September 
 it was down to ^^590, and before the end of the 
 year it had dropped to ^^125. Pope himself bought 
 stock when it stood so low as 3^104, but he had
 
 70 
 
 POPE 
 
 never the courage to sell, and consequently lost, 
 according to his own account, half his worldly 
 possessions. The Prime Minister, Sir Robert 
 Walpole, also bought stock, but he sold — as did 
 His Most Gracious Majesty the King — at ^i,ooo. 
 The age was also a scandalous, ill-living age, and 
 Pope, who was a most confirmed gossip and tale- 
 bearer, picked up all that was going. The details 
 of every lawsuit of a personal character were at 
 his finger-ends. Whoever starved a sister, or forged 
 a will, or saved his candle-ends, made a fortune 
 dishonestly, or lost one disgracefully, or was re- 
 ported to do so, be he citizen or courtier, noble 
 duke or plump alderman, Mr. Pope was sure to 
 know all about it, and as Hkely as not to put it 
 into his next satire. Living, as the poet did, within 
 easy distance of London, he always turned up in 
 a crisis as regularly as a porpoise in a storm, so at 
 least writes a noble friend. This sort of thing 
 naturally led to quarrels, and the shocking in- 
 completeness of this lecture stands demonstrated 
 by the fact that, though I have almost done, I 
 have as yet said nothing about Pope's quarrels, 
 which is nearly as bad as writing about St. Paul 
 and leaving out his journeys. Pope's quarrels are 
 celebrated. His quarrel with Mr. Addison, cul- 
 minating in the celebrated description, almost 
 every line of which is now part and parcel of the 
 English language; his quarrel with Lady Mary 
 Wortley Montagu, whom he satirised in the most 
 brutal fines ever written by man of woman; his 
 quarrel with Lord Hervey; his quarrel with the 
 celebrated Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, ought 
 not to be dismissed so fightly, but what can I do ?
 
 POPE 71 
 
 From the Duchess of Marlborough Pope is said to 
 have received a sum of money, sometimes stated 
 at ^1000 and sometimes at ^^3000, for consenting 
 to suppress his description of her as Atossa, which, 
 none the less, he published. I do not believe the 
 story; money passed between the parties and went 
 to Miss Martha Blount, but it must have been for 
 some other consideration. Sarah Jennings was no 
 fool, and loved money far too well to give it away 
 without security, and how possibly could she hope 
 by a cash payment to erase from the tablets of a 
 poet's memory lines dictated by his hate, or bind 
 by the law of honour a man capable of extorting 
 blackmail ? Then Pope quarrelled most terribly 
 with the elder Miss Blount, who, he said, used to 
 beat her mother; then he quarrelled with the 
 mother because she persisted in living with the 
 daughter and pretending to be fond of her. As for 
 his quarrels with the whole tribe of poor authors, 
 are they not writ large in the four books of the 
 Dunciad ? Mr. Swinburne is indeed able to find 
 in some, at all events, of these quarrels a species 
 of holy war, waged, as he says, in language which 
 is at all events strong, " against all the banded 
 bestialities of all dunces and all dastards, all 
 blackguardly blockheads and all blockheaded 
 blackguards." 
 
 I am sorry to be unable to allow myself to be 
 wound up in Mr. Swinburne's bucket to the height 
 of his argument. There are two kinds of quarrels, 
 the noble and the ignoble. When John Milton, 
 weary and depressed for a moment in the battle he 
 was fighting in the cause of an enlightened liberty 
 and an instructed freedom, exclaims, with the sad
 
 72 POPE 
 
 prophet Jeremy, " Woe is me, my mother, that 
 thou hast borne me, a man of strife and conten- 
 tion," we feel the subhmity of the quotation, which 
 would not be quite the case were the words uttered 
 by an Irishman returning home with a broken 
 head from Donnybrook Fair. The Dunciad was 
 quite uncalled for. Even supposing that we admit 
 that Pope was not the aggressor, 
 
 The noblest answer unto such 
 Is kindly silence when they brawl. 
 
 But it is, to say the least of it, doubtful whether 
 Pope did not begin brawling first. Swift, whose 
 misanthropy was genuine, and who begged Pope 
 whenever he thought of the world to give it another 
 lash on his (the Dean's) account, saw clearly the 
 danger of Pope's method, and wrote to him: 
 " Take care the bad poets do not outwit you as 
 they have done the good ones in every age; whom 
 they have provoked to transmit their names to 
 posterity. Maevius is as well known as Virgil, and 
 Gildon will be as well known as you if his name 
 gets into your verses; and as for the difference 
 between good and bad fame, it is a mere trifle." 
 The advice was far too good to be taken. But 
 what has happened ? The petty would-be Popes 
 but for the real Pope would have been entirely 
 forgotten. As it is, only their names survive in 
 the index to the Dunciad', their indecencies and 
 dastardly blockheadisms are as dead as Queen 
 Anne; and if the historian or the moralist seeks 
 an illustration of the coarseness and brutality of 
 their style, he finds it only too easily, not in the 
 works of the dead dunces, but in the pages of their
 
 POPE 73 
 
 persecutor. Pope had none of the grave purpose 
 which makes us, at all events, partially sympathise 
 with Ben Jonson in his quarrels with the poetasters 
 of his day. It is a mere toss-up whose name you 
 may find in the Dunciad — a miserable scribbler's 
 or a resplendent scholar's; a tasteless critic's or 
 an immortal wit's. A satirist who places Richard 
 Bentley and Daniel Defoe amongst the dunces 
 must be content to abate his pretensions to be 
 regarded as a social purge. 
 
 Men and women, we can well believe, went in 
 terror of little Mr. Pope. Well they might, for he 
 made small concealment of their names, and even 
 such as had the luck to escape obvious recognition 
 have been hoisted into infamy by the untiring 
 labours of subsequent commentators. It may, per- 
 haps, be still open to doubt who was the Florid 
 Youth referred to in the Epilogue to the Satires: 
 
 And how did, pray, the Florid Youth offend 
 Whose speech you took and gave it to a friend ? 
 
 Bowles said it was Lord Hervey, and that the 
 adjective is due to his lordship's well-known prac- 
 tice of painting himself; but Mr. Croker, who 
 knew everything, and was in the habit of con- 
 tradicting the Duke of Wellington about the 
 battle of Waterloo, says, " Certainly not. The 
 Florid Youth was young Henry Fox." 
 
 Sometimes, indeed, in our hours of languor and 
 
 dejection, when 
 
 The heart is sipk, 
 And all the wheels of being slow, 
 
 the question forces itself upon us. What can it 
 matter who the Florid Youth was, and who cares 
 how he offended ? But this questioning spirit must
 
 74 POPE 
 
 be checked. " The proper study of mankind is 
 man," and that title cannot be denied even to a 
 florid youth. Still, as I was saying, people did not 
 Hke it at the time, and the then Duke of Argyll 
 said, in his place in the House of Lords, that if 
 anybody so much as named him in an invective, 
 he would first run him through the body, and then 
 throw himself — not out of the window, as one was 
 charitably hoping — but on a much softer place — 
 the consideration of their Lordships' House. Some 
 persons of quality, of less truculent aspect than 
 McCallum More, thought to enlist the poet's ser- 
 vices, and the Duchess of Buckingham got him to 
 write an epitaph on her deceased son — a feeble 
 lad — to which transaction the poet is thought to 
 allude in the pleasing lines. 
 
 But random praise — the task can ne'er be done ; 
 Each mother asks it for her booby son. 
 
 Mr. Alderman Barber asked it for himself, and was 
 wilHng — so at least it was reported — to pay for 
 it at the handsome figure of ;^4,ooo for a single 
 couplet. Pope, however, who was not mercenary, 
 declined to gratify the alderman, who by his will 
 left the poet a legacy of £ioo, possibly hoping by 
 this benefaction, if he could not be praised in his 
 lifetime, at all events to escape posthumous abuse. 
 If this were his wish it was gratified, and the 
 alderman sleeps unsung. 
 
 Pope greatly enjoyed the fear he excited. 
 
 With something of exultation he sings : 
 
 Yes, I am proud, I must be proud to see 
 Men, not afraid of God, afraid of me; 
 Safe from the bar, the pulpit, and the throne, 
 Yet touched and shamed by ridicule alone.
 
 POPE 75 
 
 Oh sacred weapon ! left for Truth's defence. 
 
 Sole dread of folly, vice, and insolence! 
 
 To all but heaven-directed hands denied. 
 
 The Muse may give thee, but the gods must guide: 
 
 Reverent I touch thee, but with honest zeal, 
 
 To rouse the watchmen of the public weal. 
 
 To Virtue's work provoke the tardy Hall, 
 
 And goad the prelate slumb'ring in his stall. 
 
 Ye tinsel insects ! whom a court maintains, 
 
 That counts your beauties only by your stains, 
 
 Spin all your cobwebs o'er the eye of day. 
 
 The Muse's wing shall brush you all away. 
 
 All his grace preaches, all his lordship sings. 
 
 All that makes saints of queens, and gods of kings. 
 
 All, all but truth drops dead-born from the press. 
 
 Like the last gazette, or the last address. 
 
 The poet himself was very far from being in- 
 vulnerable, and he writhed at every sarcasm. There 
 was one of his contemporaries of whom he stood in 
 mortal dread, and yet whose name he was too 
 frightened even to mention. It is easy to guess 
 who this was. It was Hogarth, who in one of his 
 caricatures had depicted Pope as a hunchback, 
 whitewashing Burlington House. Pope deemed 
 this the most grievous insult of his life, but he 
 said nothing about it; the spiteful pencil proving 
 more than master of the poisoned pen. 
 
 Pope died on May 30th, 1744, bravely and cheer- 
 fully enough. His doctor was offering him one day 
 the usual encouragements, telling him his breath 
 was easier, and so on, when a friend entered, to 
 whom the poet exclaimed, " Here I am, dying of 
 a hundred good symptoms." In Spence's Anecdotes 
 there is another story, pitched in a higher key: 
 *' Shortly before his death, he said to me, ' What's 
 that ? ' pointing into the air with a very steady 
 regard, and then looked down on me and said, 
 with a smile of great pleasure, and with the greatest
 
 le POPE 
 
 softness, ' 'Twas a vision.' " It may have been so. 
 At the very last he consented to allow a priest to 
 be sent for, who attended and administered to 
 the dying man the last sacraments of the Church. 
 The spirit in which he received them cannot be 
 pronounced religious. As Cardinal Newman has 
 observed, Pope was an unsatisfactory Catholic. 
 
 Pope died in his enemies' day. 
 
 Dr. Arbuthnot, who was acknowledged by all 
 his friends to have been the best man who ever 
 lived, be the second-best who he might, had pre- 
 deceased the poet; and it should be remembered, 
 before we take upon ourselves the task of judging 
 a man we never saw, that Dr. Arbuthnot, who was 
 as shrewd as he was good, had for Pope that warm 
 personal affection we too rarely notice nowadays 
 between men of mature years. Swift said of 
 Arbuthnot, "Oh! if the world had but a dozen 
 Arbuthnots in it I would burn my Travels.'''' This 
 may be doubted without damage to the friendly 
 testimony. The terrible Dean himself, whose azure 
 eyes saw through most pretences, loved Pope; but 
 Swift was now worse than dead — he was mad, 
 dying a-top, like the shivered tree he once gazed 
 upon with horror and gloomy forebodings of 
 impending doom. 
 
 Many men must have been glad when they read 
 in their scanty journals that Mr. Pope lay dead 
 at his villa in Twickenham. They breathed the 
 easier for the news. Personal satire may be a 
 legitimate, but it is an ugly weapon. The Muse 
 often gives what the gods do not guide; and 
 though we may be willing that our faults should 
 be scourged, we naturally like to be sure that
 
 POPE Tj 
 
 we owe our sore backs to the blackness of our 
 guilt, and not merely to the fact that we have 
 the proper number of syllables to our names, or 
 because we occasionally dine with an enemy of 
 our scourger. 
 
 But living as we do at a convenient distance 
 from Mr. Pope, we may safely wish his days had 
 been prolonged, not necessarily to those of his 
 mother, but to the Psalmist's span, so that he 
 might have witnessed the dawn of a brighter day. 
 1744 was the nadir of the eighteenth century. With 
 Macbeth the dying Pope might have exclaimed: 
 
 Renown and grace is dead, 
 The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees 
 Is left in the vault to brag of. 
 
 The feats of arms that have made the first 
 ministry of the elder Pitt for ever glorious would 
 have appealed to Pope's better nature, and made 
 him forget the scandals of the court and the follies 
 of the town. Who knows but they might have stirred 
 him, for he was not wholly without the true poet's 
 prophetic gift, which dreams of things to come, to 
 foretell, in that animated and animating style of 
 his, which has no rival save glorious John Dryden's, 
 the expansion of England, and how, in far-off 
 summers he should never see, English maidens, 
 living under the Southern Cross, should solace 
 their fluttering hearts before laying themselves 
 down to sleep with some favourite bit from his 
 own Eloisa to Abelard ? Whether, in fact, maidens 
 in those latitudes do read Eloisa before blowing 
 out their candles I cannot say; but Pope, I war- 
 rant, would have thought they would. And they 
 might do worse — and better.
 
 78 POPE 
 
 Both as a poet and a man Pope had many 
 negations. 
 
 Of love, that sways the sun and all the stars, 
 
 he knew absolutely nothing. Even of the lesser light, 
 
 The eternal moon of love. 
 Under whose motions life's dull billows move, 
 
 he knew but little. 
 
 His Eloisa, splendid as is its diction, and vigorous 
 though be the portrayal of the miserable creature 
 to whom the poem relates, most certainly lacks 
 " a gracious somewhat," whilst no less certainly 
 is it marred by a most unfeeling coarseness. A 
 poem about love it may be — a love-poem it is not. 
 Of the " wild benefit of nature,'" 
 
 5) 
 
 The silence that is in the starry sky. 
 The sleep that is among the lonely hills. 
 
 Pope had small notion, though there is just a whiff 
 of Wordsworth in an observation he once hazarded, 
 that a tree is a more poetical object than a prince 
 in his coronation robes. His taste in landscape 
 gardening was honoured with the approbation of 
 Horace Walpole, and he spent ^([looo upon a grotto, 
 which incurred the ridicule of Johnson. Of that 
 indescribable something, that " greatness " which 
 causes Dryden to uplift a lofty head from the deep 
 pit of his corruption, neither Pope's character nor 
 his style bears any trace. But still, both as a poet 
 and a man we must give place, and even high place, 
 to Pope. About the poetry there can be no question. 
 A man with his wit, and faculty of expression, and 
 infinite painstaking, is not to be evicted from his 
 ancient homestead in the affections and memories
 
 POPE 79 
 
 of his people by a rabble of critics, or even a fosse 
 of poets. As for the man, he was ever eager and 
 interested in life. Beneath all his faults — for which 
 he had more excuse than a whole congregation of 
 the righteous need ever hope to muster for their 
 own shortcomings — we recognise humanity, and 
 we forgive much to humanity, knowing how much 
 need there is for humanity to forgive us. Indiffer- 
 ence, known by its hard heart and its callous 
 temper, is the only unpardonable sin. Pope never 
 committed it. He had much to put up with. We 
 have much to put up with — in him. He has given 
 enormous pleasure to generations of men, and will 
 continue so to do. We can never give him any 
 pleasure. The least we can do is to smile pleasantly 
 as we replace him upon his shelf, and say, as we 
 truthfully may, " There was a great deal of human 
 nature in Alexander Pope."
 
 LORD BOLINGBROKE 
 
 1894 
 
 THE most accomplished of all our political 
 rascals, Lord Bolingbroke, who once, if the 
 author oi Animated Nature is to be believed, 
 ran naked through the Park, has, in his otherwise 
 pinchbeck Reflections in Exile, one quaint fancy. 
 He suggests that the exile, instead of mourning the 
 deprivation of the society of his friends, should 
 take a pencil (the passage is not before me) and 
 make a list of his acquaintances, and then ask 
 himself which of the number he wants to see at the 
 moment. It is, no doubt, always wise to be par- 
 ticular. Delusion as well as fraud loves to lurk 
 in generalities. 
 
 As for this Bolingbroke himself, that he was a 
 consummate scoundrel is now universally admitted; 
 but his mental qualifications, though great, still 
 excite diflFerences of opinion. Even those who are 
 comforted by his style and soothed by the rise and 
 fall of his sentences, are fain to admit that had his 
 classic head been severed from his shoulders a rogue 
 would have met with his deserts. He has been long 
 since stripped of all his fine pretences, and, morally 
 speaking, runs as naked through the pages of 
 history as erst he did (according to Goldsmith) 
 across Hyde Park. 
 
 That Bohngbroke had it in him to have been a 
 
 80
 
 LORD BOLINGBROKE 8i 
 
 great Parliamentarian is certain. He knew " the 
 nature of that assembly," and that " they grow, 
 like hounds, fond of the man who shows them 
 sport, and by whose halloo they are used to be 
 encouraged." Like the rascally lawyer in Guy 
 Mannertng, Mr. Gilbert Glossin, he could do a good 
 piece of work when so minded. But he was seldom 
 so minded, and failed to come up to the easy 
 standard of his day, and thus brought it about 
 that by his side Sir Robert Walpole appears in the 
 wings and aspect of an angel. 
 
 St, John has now nothing to wear but his wit 
 and his style; these still find admirers amongst 
 the judicious. 
 
 Mr. Churton Collins, who has written a delight- 
 ful book about Bolingbroke, and also about Vol- 
 taire in England, has a great notion of Bolingbroke's 
 literary merits, and extols them with ardour. He 
 is not likely to be wrong, but, none the less, it is 
 lawful to surround yourself with the seven stately 
 quartos which contain Bolingbroke's works and 
 letters, and ask yourself whether Mr. Colhns is right. 
 Of all Lord Bolingbroke's published writings, 
 none is better than his celebrated Letter to fVynd- 
 ham, recounting his adventures in France, whither 
 he betook himself hastily after Queen Anne's death, 
 and where he joined the Pretender. Here he is not 
 philosophising, but telling a tale, varnished it may 
 be, but sparkling with mahce, wit, and humour. 
 Well may Mr. CoUins say, " Walpole never pro- 
 duced a more amusing sketch than the picture of 
 the Pretender's Court at Paris and of the Privy 
 Council in the Bois de Boulogne"; but when he 
 proceeds further and adds, " Burke never produced
 
 82 LORD BOLINGBROKE 
 
 anything nobler than the'passage which commences 
 with the words 'The ocean which environs us is 
 an emblem of our government,' " I am glad to 
 ejaculate, " Indeed he did ! " 
 Here is the passage : 
 
 The ocean which environs us is an emblem of our govern- 
 ment, and the pilot and the Minister are in similar circum- 
 stances. It seldom happens that either of them can steer a 
 direct course, and they both arrive at their ports by means 
 which frequently seem to carry them from it. But, as the 
 work advances, the conduct of him who leads it on with real 
 abilities clears up, the appearing inconsistencies are reconciled, 
 and, when it is once consummated, the whole shows itself so 
 uniform, so plain, and so natural, that every dabbler in 
 politics will be apt to think he could have done the same. 
 But, on the other hand, a man who proposes no such object, 
 who substitutes artifice in the place of ability, who, instead 
 of leading parties and governing accidents, is eternally agi- 
 tated backwards and forwards, who begins every day some- 
 thing new and carries nothing on to perfection, may impose 
 a while on the world, but, a little sooner or later, the mystery 
 will be revealed, and nothing will be found to be couched 
 under it but a thread of pitiful expedients, the ultimate end 
 of which never extended farther than living from day to day. 
 
 A fine passage, most undoubtedly, and an ex- 
 cellent homily for Ministers. No one but a dabbler 
 in literature will be apt to think he could have 
 done the same — but noble with the nobility of 
 Burke ? A noble passage ought to do more for 
 a reader than compel his admiration or win his 
 assent; it should leave him a little better than it 
 found him, with a warmer heart and a more 
 elevated mind. 
 
 Mr. Collins also refers with delight to a disserta- 
 tion on Eloquence, to be found in the Letter on the 
 Spirit of Patriotism, and again expresses a doubt 
 whether it would be possible to select anything 
 finer from the pages of Burke,
 
 LORD BOLINGBROKE 83 
 
 The passage is too long to be quoted; it begins 
 thus: 
 
 Eloquence has charms to lead mankind, and gives a nobler 
 superiority than power that every dunce may use, or fraud 
 that every knave may employ. 
 
 And then follows a good deal about Demosthenes 
 and Cicero, and other talkers of old time. 
 
 This may or may not be a fine passage; but if 
 we allow it to be the former, we cannot admit that 
 as it flows it fertilises. 
 
 Bolingbroke and Chesterfield are two of the 
 remarkable figures of the first half of the last 
 century. They are both commonly called " great," 
 to distinguish them from other holders of the same 
 titles. Their accomplishments were as endless as 
 their opportunities. They were the most eloquent 
 men of their time, and both possessed that insight 
 into things, that distinction of mind, we call genius. 
 They were ready writers, and have left " works " 
 behind them full of wit and gracious expressions; 
 but neither the one nor the other has succeeded 
 in lodging himself in the general memory. The 
 ill-luck which drove them out of politics has pur- 
 sued them down the path of letters, though the 
 frequenters of that pleasant track are wisely 
 indifferent to the characters of dead authors 
 who still give pleasure. 
 
 No shrewder men ever sat upon a throne than 
 the first two Georges, monarchs of this realm. 
 The second George hated Chesterfield, and called 
 him " a tea-table scoundrel." The phrase sticks. 
 There is something petty about this great Lord 
 Chesterfield. The first George, though wholly 
 illiterate, yet took it upon himself to despise
 
 84 LORD BOLINGBROKE 
 
 Bolingbroke, philosopher though he was, and 
 dismissed an elaborate effusion of his as " baga- 
 telles.'''' Here again the phrase sticks, and not even 
 the beautiful type and lordly margins of Mallet's 
 edition of Lord Bolingbroke's writings, or the 
 stately periods of that nobleman himself, can 
 drive the royal verdict out of my ears. There 
 is nothing real about these writings save their 
 colossal impudence, as when, for example, in his 
 letter on the State of Parties on the accession 
 of George L, he solemnly denies that there was 
 any design during the four last years of Queen 
 Anne's reign to set aside the Hanover succession, 
 and, in support of his denial, quotes himself as a 
 man who, if there had been anything of the sort, 
 must have known of it. By the side of this man 
 the perfidy of Thurlow or of Wedderburn shows 
 white as wool. 
 
 By the aid of his own wits and a cunning wife, 
 and assisted by the growing hatred of corruption, 
 Bolingbroke, towards the close of his long life, 
 nearly succeeded in securing some measure of 
 oblivion of his double-dyed treachery. He managed 
 to inflame the " Young England " of the period 
 with his picture of a " Patriot King," and if he 
 had only put into the fire his lucubrations about 
 Christianity he might have accomplished his exit 
 from a world he had made worse for seventy-five 
 years with a show of decency. But he did not do 
 so; the "cur Mallet" was soon ready with his 
 volumes, and then the memory of Bolingbroke 
 was exposed to the obloquy which in this country 
 is (or was) the heritage of the heterodox. 
 
 Horace Walpole, who hated Bolingbroke, as he
 
 LORD BOLINGBROKE 85 
 
 was in special duty bound to do, felt this keenly. 
 He was glad Bolingbroke was gibbeted, but re- 
 gretted that he should swing on a wrong count 
 in the indictment. 
 
 Writing to Sir Horace Mann, Walpole says : 
 
 You say you have made my Lord Cork give up my Lord 
 Bolingbroke. It is comical to see how he is given up here 
 since the best of his writings, his metaphysical divinity, has 
 been published. While he betrayed and abused every man 
 who trusted him, or who had forgiven him, or to whom he 
 was obliged, he was a hero, a patriot, a philosopher, and the 
 greatest genius of the age; the moment his Craftsmen 
 against Moses and St. Paul are published we have discovered 
 he was the worst man and the worst writer in the world. 
 The grand jury have presented his works, and as long as there 
 are any parsons he will be ranked with Tindal and Toland 
 — nay, I don't know whether my father won't become a rubric 
 martyr for having been persecuted by him. 
 
 My sympathies are with Walpole, although, 
 when he pronounces Bolingbroke's metaphysical 
 divinity to be the best of his writings, I cannot 
 agree. 
 
 Mr. Collins' book is a most excellent one, and 
 if anyone reads it because of my recommendation 
 he will owe me thanks. Mr. Collins values Pope 
 not merely for his poetry, but for his philosophy 
 also, which he cadged from Bolingbroke. The 
 Essay on Man is certainly better reading than 
 anything Bolingbroke ever wrote — though what 
 may be the value of its philosophy is a question 
 which may well stand over till after the next 
 General Election, or even longer.
 
 DEAN SWIFT 
 
 1894 
 
 OF writing books about Dean Swift there is 
 no end. I make no complaint, because I 
 find no fault ; I express no wonder, for 
 I feel none. The subject is, and must always 
 remain, one of strange fascination. We have no 
 author hke the Dean of St. Patrick's. It has been 
 said of Wordsworth that good luck usually attended 
 those who have written about him. The same thing 
 may be said, with at least equal truth, about Swift. 
 There are a great many books about him, and with 
 few exceptions they are all interesting. 
 
 A man who has had his tale told both by Johnson 
 and by Scott ought to be comprehensible. Swift 
 has been, on the whole, lucky with his more recent 
 biographers. Dr. Craik's is a judicious life, Mitford's 
 an admirable sketch, Forster's a valuable fragment; 
 Mr. Leslie Stephen never fails to get to close 
 quarters with his subject. Then there are anec- 
 dotes without end — all bubbling with vitality — 
 letters, and journals. And yet, when you have 
 read all that is to be read, what are you to say — 
 what to think ? 
 
 No fouler pen than Swift's has soiled our Hter- 
 ature. His language is horrible from first to last. 
 He is full of odious images, of base and abominable 
 allusions. It would be a labour of Hercules to 
 cleanse his pages. His love-letters are defaced by 
 his incurable coarseness. This habit of his is so 
 
 86
 
 DEAN SWIFT 87 
 
 inveterate that it seems a miracle he kept his 
 sermons free from his blackguard phrases. It is 
 a question not of morality, but of decency, whether 
 it is becoming to sit in the same room with the 
 works of this divine. How the good Sir Walter 
 ever managed to see him through the press is 
 amazing. In this matter Swift is inexcusable. 
 
 Then his unfeeling temper, his domineering 
 brutality — the tears he drew, the discomfort 
 he occasioned. 
 
 Swift, dining at a house, where the part of the tablecloth 
 which was next him happened to have a small hole, tore 
 it as wide as he could, and ate his soup through it; his 
 reason for such behaviour was, as he said, to mortify the 
 lady of the house, and to teach her to pay a proper attention 
 to housewifery. 
 
 One is glad to know he sometimes met his 
 match. He slept one night at an inn kept by a 
 widow lady of very respectable family, Mrs. 
 Seneca, of Drogheda. In the morning he made 
 a violent complaint of the sheets being dirty. 
 
 " Dirty, indeed! " exclaimed Mrs. Seneca; " you 
 are the last man, doctor, that should complain of 
 dirty sheets." 
 
 And so, indeed, he was, for he had just published 
 the Lady's Dressing-room, a very dirty sheet indeed. 
 
 Honour to Mrs. Seneca, of Drogheda! 
 
 This side of the account needs no vouching; but 
 there is another side. 
 
 In 1705 Addison made a present of his book of 
 
 travels to Dr. Swift, in the blank leaf of which he 
 
 wrote the following words : 
 
 To Dr. Jonathan Swift, 
 
 The most agreeable companion, 
 
 The truest friend, 
 
 Axid the greatest genius of his age.
 
 88 DEAN SWIFT 
 
 Addison was not lavish of epithets. His geese, 
 Ambrose Philips excepted, were geese, not swans. 
 His testimony is not to be shaken — and what a 
 testimony it is ! 
 
 Then there is Stella's Swift. As for Stella herself, 
 I have never felt I knew enough about her to join 
 very heartily in Thackeray's raptures : " Who has 
 not in his mind an image of Stella ? Who does not 
 love her ? Fair and tender creature ! Pure and 
 affectionate heart! . . . Gentle lady! so lovely, so 
 loving, so unhappy. . . . You are one of the saints 
 of English story." This may be so, but all I feel 
 I know about Stella is, that Swift loved her. That 
 is certain, at all events. 
 
 If this be error, and upon me proved, 
 I never writ, and no man ever loved. 
 
 The verses to Stella are altogether lovely : 
 
 But, Stella, say what evil tongue 
 Reports you are no longer young, 
 That Time sits with his scythe to mow 
 Where erst sat Cupid with his bow. 
 That half your locks are turned to gray ? 
 I'll ne'er believe a word they say. 
 'Tis true, but let it not be known, 
 My eyes are somewhat dimmish grown. 
 
 And again: 
 
 Oh ! then, whatever Heaven intends. 
 Take pity on your pitying friends ! 
 Nor let your ills affect your mind 
 To fancy they can be unkind. 
 Me, surely me, you ought to spare 
 Who gladly would your suffering share. 
 Or give my scrap of life to you 
 And think it far beneath your due; 
 You, to whose care so oft I owe 
 That I'm alive to tell you so. 
 
 We are all strangely woven in one piece, as
 
 DEAN SWIFT 89 
 
 Shakespeare says. These verses of Swift irre- 
 sistibly remind their readers of Cowper's Hnes to 
 Mrs. Unwin. 
 
 Swift's prose is famous all the world over. To 
 say anything about it is superfluous. David Hume 
 indeed found fault with it. Hume paid great 
 attention to the English language, and by the 
 time he died had come to write it with much 
 facility and creditable accuracy; but Swift is one 
 of the masters of English prose. But how admir- 
 able also is his poetry — easy, yet never slipshod! 
 It lacks one quality only — imagination. There is 
 not a fine phrase, a magical line to be found in it, 
 such as may occasionally be found in — let us say 
 — Butler. Yet, as a whole. Swift is a far more 
 enjoyable poet than Butler. 
 
 Swift has unhappily written some abominable 
 verses, which ought never to have been set up in 
 type; but the Legion Club, the verses on his own 
 death, Cadenus and Vanessa, the Rhapsody on 
 Poetry, the tremendous lines on the Day oj Judg- 
 ment, and many others, all belong to enjoyable 
 poetry, and can never lose their freshness, their 
 charm, their vitality. Amongst the poets of the 
 eighteenth century Swift sits secure, for he can 
 never go out of fashion. 
 
 His hatred of mankind seems genuine; there is 
 nothing falsetto about it. He is always in sober, 
 deadly earnest when he abuses his fellow-men. 
 What an odd revenge we have taken! His gospel 
 of hatred, his testament of woe — his Gulliver, upon 
 which he expended the treasures of his wit, and 
 into which he instilled the concentrated essence of 
 his rage — has become a child's book, and has been
 
 90 DEAN SWIFT 
 
 read with wonder and delight by generations of 
 innocents. After all, it is a kindly place, this planet, 
 and the best use we have for our cynics is to let 
 them amuse the junior portion of our population. 
 
 I only know one good-humoured anecdote of 
 Swift; it is very slight, but it is fair to tell it. He 
 dined one day in the company of the Lord Keeper, 
 his son, and their two ladies, with Mr. Caesar, 
 Treasurer of the Navy, at his house in the City. 
 They happened to talk of Brutus, and Swift said 
 something in his praise, and then, as it were, 
 suddenly recollecting himself, said: 
 
 " Mr. Caesar, I beg your pardon." 
 
 One can fancy this occasioning a pleasant ripple 
 of laughter. 
 
 There is another story I cannot lay my hands on 
 to verify, but it is to this effect : Faulkner, Swift's 
 Dublin publisher, years after the Dean's death, was 
 dining with some friends, who rallied him upon his 
 odd way of eating some dish — I think, asparagus. 
 He confessed Swift had told him it was the right 
 way; therefore, they laughed the louder, until 
 Faulkner, growing a little angry, exclaimed : 
 
 " I tell you what it is, gentlemen: if you had 
 ever dined with the Dean, you would have eaten 
 your asparagus as he bade you." 
 
 Truly a wonderful man — imperious, masterful. 
 Yet his state is not kingly like Johnson's — it is 
 tyrannical, sinister, forbidding. 
 
 Nobody has brought out more effectively than 
 Mr. Churton Collins ^ Swift's almost ceaseless 
 literary activity. To turn over Scott's nineteen 
 volumes is to get some notion of it. It is not a 
 
 * Jonathan Swift, by J. Churton Collins: Chatto and Windus, 1893.
 
 DEAN SWIFT 91 
 
 pleasant task, for Swift was an unclean spirit; but 
 he fascinates and makes the reader long to peep 
 behind the veil, and penetrate the secret of this 
 horrible, yet lovable, because beloved, man. Mr. 
 Collins is rather short with this longing on the part 
 of the reader. He does not believe in any secret; 
 he would have us believe that it is all as plain as a 
 pikestaff. Swift was never mad, and was never 
 married. Stella was a well-regulated damsel, who, 
 though she would have liked very much to have 
 been Mrs. Dean, soon recognised that her friend 
 was not a marrying man, and was, therefore, well 
 content for the rest of her days to share his society 
 with Mrs. Dingley. Vanessa was an ill-regulated 
 damsel, who had not the wit to see that her lover 
 was not a marrying man, and, in the most vulgar 
 fashion possible, thrust herself most inconveniently 
 upon his notice, received a snubbing, took to drink, 
 and died of the spleen. As for the notion that Swift 
 died mad, Mr. Collins conceives himself to get rid 
 of that by reprinting a vague and most inconclusive 
 letter of Dr. BuckniU's. The mystery and the misery 
 of Swift's life have not been got rid of by Mr. 
 Collins. He has left them where he found them — at 
 large. He complains, perhaps justly, that Scott 
 never took the trouble to form any clear impres- 
 sion of Swift's character. Yet we must say that 
 we understand Sir Walter's Swift better than we 
 do Mr. Collins's. Whether the Dean m.arried Stella 
 can never be known. For our part, we think he did 
 not; but to assert positively that no marriage took 
 place, as Mr. Collins does, is to carry dogmatism 
 too far. 
 
 A good deal of fault has lately been found with
 
 92 DEAN SWIFT 
 
 Thackeray's lecture on Swift. We still think it 
 both delightful and just. The rhapsody about 
 Stella, as I have already hinted, is not to our mind. 
 Rhapsodies about real women are usually out of 
 place. Stella was no saint, but a quick-witted, 
 sharp-tongued hussy, whose fate it was to win the 
 love and pacify the soul of the greatest English- 
 man of his time — for to call Swift an Irishman is 
 sheer folly. But, apart from this not unnatural 
 slip, what, I wonder, is the matter with Thackeray's 
 lecture, regarded, not as a storehouse of facts, or 
 as an estimate of Swift's writings, but as a sketch 
 of character ? Mr. Collins says quite as harsh things 
 about Swift as are to be found in Thackeray's 
 lecture, but he does not attempt, as Thackeray 
 does, to throw a strong light upon this strange and 
 moving figure. It is a hard thing to attempt — 
 failure in such a case is almost inevitable; but I 
 do not think Thackeray did fail. An ounce of 
 mother-wit is often worth a pound of clergy. In- 
 sight is not always the child of study. But here, 
 again, the matter should be brought to the test 
 by each reader for himself. Read Thackeray's 
 lecture once again. 
 
 What can be happier or truer than his com- 
 parison of Swift with a highwayman disappointed 
 of his plunder ? 
 
 The great prize has not come yet. The coach with the 
 mitre and crosier in it, which he intends to have for his share, 
 has been delayed on the way from St. James's. The mails 
 wait until nightfall, when his runners come and tell him that 
 the coach has taken a different road and escaped him. So he 
 fires his pistols into the air with a curse, and rides away into 
 his own country. 
 
 Thackeray's criticism is severe, but is it not
 
 DEAN SWIFT 93 
 
 just ? Are we to stand by and hear our nature 
 libelled, and our purest affections beslimed, with- 
 out a word of protest ? " I think I would rather 
 have had a potato and a friendly word from Gold- 
 smith than have been beholden to the Dean for a 
 guinea and a dinner." So would I. But no one of 
 the Dean's numerous critics was more keenly alive 
 than Thackeray both to the majesty and splendour 
 of Swift's genius, and to his occasional flashes of 
 tenderness and love. That amazing person. Lord 
 Jeffrey, in one of his too numerous contributions 
 to the Edinburgh Review, wrote of the poverty 
 of Swift's style. Lord Jeffrey was, we hope, a 
 professional critic, not an amateur.
 
 " GULLIVER'S TRAVELS » ^ 
 1919 
 
 CHRISTMAS is once more upon us and finds 
 us worn, wearied, and disillusioned by a 
 great war, and yet here again in the book- 
 shops, meeting the eye, are two new and cheerfully 
 illustrated editions, from London and Philadelphia, 
 of Gulliver's Travels, a book now nearly approach- 
 ing its second century, for the use, behoof and 
 delight of the children of both worlds. Its author 
 takes rank with Arbuthnot and Fielding as the 
 greatest of our ironists; but what greater irony 
 can there be than to discover that Swift's Travels, 
 his Gulliver, his, to quote a writer I believe to be 
 still living, " gospel of hatred, his testament of 
 woe, upon which he expended the treasures of his 
 wit, and into which he instilled the concentrated 
 essence of his rage," has become a child's book 
 and a suitable Christmas present ? 
 
 The genesis of Gulliver, though the execution 
 was entirely Swift's, arose out of a combination of 
 famous wits, who in 17 14 composed the Scribblers' 
 Club, consisting of Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, Parnell, 
 and Gay as its leading spirits, though, as the late 
 Mr. Aitken tells us in his edition of Arbuthnot's 
 
 * Gulliver's Travels. Edited by Padraic Colum. Presented by 
 Willy Pog4ny, (Harrap, 296 pp., 7s. 6d.) 
 
 Gulliver's Travels: A Voyage to Lilliput. A Voyage to Brob- 
 di-yignag. With illustrations in colour by Maria L. Kirk. {Lippincott, 
 221 pp., 6s.) 
 
 94
 
 "GULLIVER'S TRAVELS" 95 
 
 works (Oxford, 1892), Lord Oxford, Bishop Atter- 
 bury, and Congreve were associated with them. 
 One of the designs of the Club, according to 
 Warburton, was to write (Pope, Arbuthnot and 
 Swift combining for that purpose) a satire on the 
 abuses of human learning, and to make it the better 
 received, they proposed to do it in the manner 
 of Cervantes, under the history of some feigned 
 adventures. 
 
 Co-operative plans of this kind are seldom 
 carried out, great wits being usually intensely 
 individualistic, and the nearest approach to any 
 common authorship by the members of the Club 
 was the composition of the First Book of the 
 Memoirs of ScribleruSy and even this was probably 
 the sole work of Arbuthnot. It does, however, 
 contain in its thirteenth chapter a broad hint of 
 Gulliver^s Travels. But it is no more than a hint, 
 for if ever there was a book which proceeded solely 
 from the mind and idiosyncrasy of one man, it 
 was " Travels into Several Remote Nations of the 
 World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, first 
 a Surgeon and then a Captain of Several Ships." 
 
 During the years 1724-5-6 Swift, as author, 
 worked hard upon his Travels. He writes to Pope : 
 
 I have employed my time (beside ditching) in finishing, 
 correcting, amending and transcribing my Travels, in four 
 parts complete, newly augmented and intended for the press 
 when the world shall deserve them, or rather when a printer 
 shall be found brave enough to venture his ears. I like the 
 scheme of our meeting after distresses and dispersions, but the 
 chief end I propose for myself in all my labours is to vex the 
 world rather than divert it, and if I could compass that design 
 without hurting my own person or fortune, I would be the 
 most indefatigable writer you have ever seen. 
 
 Swift paid his second visit to London in March
 
 96 "GULLIVER'S TRAVELS" 
 
 1 726, bringing the manuscript of his Travels with him 
 to show to Bohngbroke, Pope and Arbuthnot, and 
 to find for it a pubhsher " brave enough to venture 
 his ears." The three friends were delighted with 
 the manuscript, and a pubhsher was soon found, 
 Mr. Benjamin Motte, at the Middle Temple Gate. 
 
 In November 1726 the book appeared in two 
 volumes, and took the town by storm; but by 
 that time the Dean was back in Dublin, tortured 
 by the illness of Stella, and maddened, when he 
 came to read Gulliver, to discover how the cautious 
 publisher, with the fate of Defoe before him, and 
 on the advice of his Reader, " one Took, a Clergy- 
 man," had mangled the text. The author of a 
 former famous book had not quite sixty years 
 earlier been much irritated by the caution and 
 delay of another clerical gentleman called Tomkins.-' 
 
 Gulliver^ even thus mangled, sold better than 
 Paradise Lost. Gay wrote to the author: "The 
 whole impression sold in a week. From the highest 
 to the lowest it is universally read — from the 
 Cabinet Council to the Nursery." Arbuthnot 
 wrote saying that he believed Gulliver^s Travels 
 would have as great a run as John Bunyan, adding, 
 " GulHver is a happy man that at his age can 
 write so merry a book." " Happy " and " merry ": 
 strange epithets to apply to such a man as Swift 
 and to such a book as Gulliver^s Travels. But 
 Arbuthnot may have been writing more as a wise 
 and friendly physician than as a critic, searching 
 for le mot juste. 
 
 We need not wonder that the old Duchess of 
 Marlborough gloated over Gulliver, for it fed her 
 
 ' See " Tomkins Redivivus," post.
 
 "GULLIVER'S TRAVELS" 97 
 
 hatreds, but it is sad to read that Maids of Honour 
 chuckled loudest over those very passages for which 
 buyers of the editions mentioned in the foot- 
 note will look in vain. Modern press-readers are 
 more squeamish than Mr. Took, who probably 
 never conceived the possibility of Gulliver's Travels 
 becoming a book for children. And yet we have 
 Gay's word for it that from the first week children 
 seized upon the Travels^ and marked them for their 
 very own. I suppose we may rely upon this testi- 
 mony, though Gay was a bachelor. The only money 
 Swift ever made by his writings was 3^300 for the 
 English edition of Gulliver. The Irish booksellers, 
 despite their love for their great Dean, pirated his 
 book without either mercy or shame. Nor did the 
 English newspaper press treat it any better, for 
 it was reprinted in instalments in a weekly news- 
 paper. In France, we are told, "it was read 
 with avidity, and a few weeks after its appearance 
 portions of it were twice dramatised." This was 
 indeed success. 
 
 So much for the Christmas of 1726. What about 
 the Christmas of 1919? How does Captain Lemuel 
 Gulliver stand to-day ? 
 
 A clear note of difference is discernible among 
 the critics. I give a few excerpts from the late 
 Mr. Churton CoUins: 
 
 It has no moral, no social, no philosophical purpose. It 
 was the mere ebullition of cynicism and misanthropy. A 
 savage jeu d' esprit. And as such wise men will regard it. But 
 there have never been wanting critics to place it on a much 
 higher footing ; 
 
 and Mr. Collins quotes Hazhtt, who declared that 
 Gulliver was an "attempt to tear off the mask of
 
 98 " GULLIVER'S TRAVELS 
 
 5) 
 
 imposture from the world, and that nothing but 
 imposture had a right to complain of it." Mr. 
 Collins, after seeking to upset Hazlitt, proceeds : 
 
 At no period distinguished by generosity of sentiment, by 
 humanity, by decency, could such satire have been universally 
 applauded. Yet so it was. The men and women of those 
 times appear to have seen nothing objectionable in an apo- 
 logue winch would scarcely have passed without protest in 
 the Rome of Petronius. {Jonathan Swift, by John Churton 
 Colhns, Chatto and Windus, 1893, pp. 208, 213.) 
 
 Mr. Gerald Moriarty affirms that " in the records 
 of misanthropy, Gulliver^s Travels stands for all 
 time supreme and unapproachable." 
 
 Mr. Thackeray's estimate is well known. Sir 
 Walter Scott was content to say: 
 
 Severe, unjust and degrading as this satire is, it was hailed 
 with malignant triumph by those whose disappointed hopes 
 had thrown them into the same state of gloomy misanthropy 
 which it argues in its author. 
 
 But younger critics may now be found who take 
 Hazlitt's view and think more nobly of Gulliver^s 
 Travels. Mr. Charles Whibley, for example, has an 
 easy task in disposing of the calumny that Swift was 
 a misanthrope who hated all mankind, for he was 
 not only one of the most practically benevolent of 
 men, but the best-loved of all authors of equal fame. 
 And as for his cynicism, Mr. Whibley declares: 
 
 The heart that was torn by scBva indignatio, to use a phrase 
 from the epitaph he composed for himself, was no cynic's heart. 
 The truth is he was a born idealist, with no desire either to 
 snarl or smile at life. The master passion of his mind was 
 anger against injustice and oppression . . . He hated injustice 
 and dishonour wherever he saw them. . . . Why, then, 
 should Swift have been thus monstrously misunderstood ? 
 Why should he be pursued after death by a kind of personal 
 venom ? I think for the very reason that he was no cynic. 
 He could not regard leniently the folly of those about him. 
 He did not write for his own pleasure, or to put money in
 
 "GULLIVER'S TRAVELS" 99 
 
 his own pocket. He wrote in scorn of stupidity, or with a 
 fixed desire to reform abuses. He does not temper the wind 
 of his wrath to his shorn victims. He does not bring an easy 
 message of perfectibihty to a sanguine world. He is ever 
 cruel in his denunciation of abuses, and those who regard 
 hterature as an anodyne do not like cruelty. But let it be 
 remembered that Swift's cruelty was always justified. [Swift, 
 by Charles Whibley, Cambridge, 191 7.) 
 
 This is well said. 
 
 Forty years ago I took home with me the 
 nineteen volumes of Scott's edition of Swift, and 
 if I know the contents of any books, I know the 
 contents of these, now battered, tomes, and I 
 confess that from time to time, under the influence 
 of different passages and poems, I have " wobbled " 
 in my opinion about the inherent disposition and 
 frame of mind of this famous man. At the present 
 hour I incline to Mr. Whibley's estimate of Gulliver 
 rather than to Mr. Collins's. 
 
 There however the book is, and there it will 
 remain. New editions of the Travels will appear 
 for the next two hundred years at Yule-tide! 
 
 In the Gentleman's Magazine for October 1782 
 there is a character of Dean Swift, " From the MSS. 
 of a Gentleman lately deceased in Dublin," which 
 concludes thus: 
 
 From the whole survey of the man I am inclined to think 
 that, like Rembrandt's figures, he would have been lost in the 
 shadows of his character, if the strength of the lights had 
 not relieved him. 
 
 The best thing worth having would be the opinion 
 of those children in Great Britain and America 
 who will read for the first time their Gulliver^s 
 Travels in these two new editions. I wish such 
 unbiassed testimony could be first obtained and 
 then preserved for another two hundred years.
 
 JOHN GAY 
 
 1894 
 
 THE first half of the eighteenth century was 
 in England the poets' playground. These 
 rhyming gentry had then a status, a claim 
 upon private munificence and the public purse 
 which has long since been hopelessly barred. A 
 measure of wit, a tincture of taste, and a perse- 
 verance in demand would in those days secure for 
 the puling Muse slices of solid pudding whilst in 
 the flesh, and (frequently) sepulture in the Abbey 
 when all was over. 
 
 What silk-mercer's apprentice in these hard 
 times, finding a place behind Messrs. Marshall and 
 Snelgrove's counter not jumping with his genius, 
 dare hope by the easy expedient of publishing a 
 pamphlet on The Present State of Wit to become 
 domestic steward to a semi-royal Duchess, and the 
 friend of Mr. Lewis Morris and Mr. Lecky, who are, 
 I suppose, our nineteenth-century equivalents for 
 Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift ? Yet such 
 was the happy fate of Gay, who, after an idle life 
 of undeserved good-fortune and much unmanly 
 repining, died of an inflammation, in spite of the 
 skilled care of Arbuthnot and the unwearying 
 solicitude of the Duchess of Queensberry, and was 
 interred like a peer of the realm in Westminster 
 Abbey, having for his pall-bearers the Earl of 
 Chesterfield, Viscount Cornbury, the Hon. Mr. 
 Berkeley, General Dormer, Mr. Gore, and Mr. 
 
 100
 
 JOHN GAY loi 
 
 Pope. Such a recognition of the author of Fables 
 and The Beggar's Opera must make Mr. Besant's 
 mouth water. Nor did Gay, despite heavy losses 
 in the South Sea Company, die a pauper; he left 
 £6000 behind him, which, as he was wise enough 
 to die intestate, was divided equally between his 
 two surviving sisters. 
 
 Gay's good luck has never forsaken him. He 
 enjoys, if, indeed, the word be not the hoUowest 
 of mockeries, an eternity of fame. It is true he is 
 not read much, but he is always read a little. He 
 has been dead more than a century and a half, so 
 it seems hkely that a hundred and fifty years 
 hence he will be read as much as he is now, and, 
 like a cork, will be observed bobbing on the surface 
 of men's memories. Better men and better poets 
 than he have been, and will be, entirely submerged ; 
 but he was happy in his hour, happy even in his 
 name (which lent itself to rhyme), happy in his 
 nature; and so (such at least is our prognostica- 
 tion) new editions of Gay's slender remains will at 
 long intervals continue to appear and to attract 
 a moment's attention, even as Mr. Underhill's 
 admirable edition of the poems has lately done; 
 new anthologies will contain his name, the bio- 
 graphical dictionaries will never quite forget him, 
 his tomb in the Abbey will be stared at by im- 
 pressionable youngsters. Pope's striking epitaph 
 will invite the fault-finding of the critical, and his 
 own jesting couplet incur the censure of the 
 morahst, until the day dawns when men cease 
 to forget themselves in trifles. As soon as they 
 do this, Gay will be forgotten once and for ever. 
 
 Gay's one real achievement was The Beggar''s
 
 102 JOHN GAY 
 
 Opera, which sprang from a sprout of Swift's great 
 brain. A " Newgate pastoral might make an odd, 
 pretty sort of thing," so the Dean once remarked 
 to Gay; and as Mr. Underhill, in his admirable 
 Life of our poet, reminds us, Swift repeated the 
 suggestion in a letter to Pope : " What think you 
 of a Newgate pastoral among the whores and 
 thieves there ? " But Swift's Beggar's Opera would 
 not have hit the public taste between wind and 
 water as did Gay's. It would have been much 
 too tremendous a thing — its sincerity would have 
 damned it past redemption. Even in Gay's light 
 hands the thing was risky — a speculation in the 
 public fancy which could not but be dangerous. 
 Gay knew this well enough, hence his quotation 
 from Martial (afterwards adopted by the Tenny- 
 sons as the motto for Poems by Two Brothers), Nos 
 hcec novimus esse nihil. Congreve, resting on his 
 laurels, declared it would either take greatly, or 
 be damned confoundedly. It took, and, indeed, 
 we cannot wonder. There was a foretaste of Gilbert 
 about it quite enough to make its fortune in any 
 century. Furthermore, it drove out of England, 
 so writes an early editor, " for that season, the 
 Italian opera, which had carried all before it for 
 several years." It was a triumph for the home- 
 bred article, and therefore dear to the souls of all 
 true patriots. 
 
 The piece, though as wholly without sincerity 
 as a pastoral by Ambrose Philips, a thing merely 
 of the footlights, entirely shorn of a single one of 
 the rays which glorify lawlessness in Burns's Jolly 
 Beggars, yet manages through the medium of the 
 songs to convey a pleasing though absurd senti-
 
 JOHN GAY 103 
 
 mentality; and there is, perhaps, noticeable 
 throughout a slight — a. very slight — flavour of 
 what is curtly but conveniently called " the 
 Revolution," which imparts a slender interest. 
 
 The Beggar^s Opera startled the propriety of 
 that strange institution, the Church of England — 
 a seminary of true religion which had left the task 
 of protesting against the foulness of Dryden and 
 Wycherley and the unscrupulous wit of Congreve 
 and Vanbrugh to the hands of non-jurors like 
 Collier and Law, but which, speaking, we suppose, 
 in the interests of property, raised a warning voice 
 when a comic opera made fun, not of marriage 
 vows, but of highway robbery. Dr. Herring,^ 
 afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, plucked up 
 courage to preach against The Beggar^s Opera 
 before the Court, but the Head of the Church 
 paid no attention to the divine, and, with the 
 Queen and all the princesses, attended the twenty- 
 first representation. The piece brought good luck 
 all round. " Everybody," so Mr. Underhill assures 
 us, " connected with the theatre (Lincoln's Inn 
 Fields), from the principal performer down to the 
 box-keepers, got a benefit," and Miss Lavinia 
 Fenton, who played Polly Peachum, lived to 
 become Duchess of Bolton; whilst Hogarth painted 
 no less than three pictures of the celebrated scene, 
 " How happy could I be with either — were t'other 
 dear charmer away." 
 
 Dr. Johnson, in his Life of Gay, deals scornfully 
 with the absurd notion that robbers were multi- 
 plied by the popularity of The Beggar''s Opera. 
 
 • Known after 1745 as " Red Herring," he having raised a 
 regiment of " red females " against the Jacobites.
 
 104 JOHN GAY 
 
 " It is not likely to do good," says the Doctor, 
 " nor can it be conceived, without more specula- 
 tion than life requires or admits, to be productive 
 of much evil." The Church of England might as 
 well have held its tongue. 
 
 Gay, flushed with success, was not long in pro- 
 ducing a sequel called Polly, which, however, as 
 it was supposed to offend, not against morality, 
 which it undoubtedly did, but against Sir Robert 
 Walpole, was prohibited. Polly was printed, and, 
 being prohibited, had a great sale. It is an ex- 
 ceedingly nasty piece, not unworthy of one of the 
 three authors who between them produced that 
 stupidest of farces, Three Hours after Marriage. 
 
 Gay's third opera, Achilles, was produced at 
 Covent Garden after his death. One does not 
 need to be a classical purist to be offended at the 
 sight of Achilles upon a stage, singing doggerel 
 verses to the tune of " Butter'd Pease," or at 
 hearing Ajax exclaim: 
 
 Honour called me to the task. 
 No matter for explaining, 
 'Tis a fresh affront to ask 
 A man of honour's meaning. 
 
 This vulgar and idiotic stuff ran twenty nights. 
 
 Gay's best-known poetical pieces are his Fables, 
 and his undoubtedly interesting, though intrin- 
 sically dull Trivia : or The Art of Walking the 
 Streets of London, though for our own part we would 
 as lief read his Shepherds^ Week as anything else 
 Gay has ever written. 
 
 The Fables are light and lively, and might safely 
 be recommended to all who are fond of an easy 
 quotation. To lay them down is never difflcult.
 
 JOHN GAY 105 
 
 and if, after having done so, Swift's Confession of 
 the Beasts is taken up, how vast the difference! 
 There are, we know, those in whose nature there 
 is too much of the milk of human kindness to 
 enable them to enjoy Swift when he shows his 
 teeth ; but however this may be, we confess, 
 if we are to read at all, we must prefer Swift's 
 Beasts'' Confession to all the sixty-five fables of 
 Gay put together. 
 
 The Swine with contrite heart allow 'd 
 His shape and beauty made him proud; 
 In diet was perhaps too nice, 
 But gluttony was ne'er his vice; 
 In every turn of life content 
 And meekly took what fortune sent. 
 Inquire through all the parish round, 
 A better neighbour ne'er was found. 
 His vigilance might some displease; 
 'Tis true he hated sloth like pease. 
 
 The Chaplain vows he cannot fawn. 
 Though it would raise him to the lawn. 
 He passed his hours among his books. 
 You find it in his meagre looks. 
 He might if he were worldly wise 
 Preferment get and spare his eyes; 
 But owns he has a stubborn spirit 
 That made him trust alone to merit; 
 Would rise by merit to promotion. 
 Alas ! a mere chimeric notion. 
 
 Gay was found pleasing by his friends, and had, 
 we must believe, a kind heart. Swift, who was a 
 nice observer in such matters, in his famous poem 
 on his own death, assigns Gay a week in which 
 to grieve: 
 
 Poor Pope would grieve a month, and Gay 
 
 A week, and Arbuthnot a day; 
 
 St. John himself will scarce forbear 
 
 To bite his pen and drop a tear; 
 
 The rest will give a shrug and cry, 
 
 " I'm sorry, but we all must die."
 
 io6 JOHN GAY 
 
 It is a matter of notoriety that Gay was very 
 fat and fond of eating. He is, as we have aheady 
 said, buried in Westminster Abbey, over against 
 Chaucer. When all the rubbish is carted away 
 from the Abbey to make room for the great men 
 and women of the twentieth century. Gay will 
 probably be accounted just good enough to remain 
 where he is. He always was a lucky fellow, though 
 he had not the grace to think so.
 
 SIR JOHN VANBRUGH 
 
 1894 
 
 JEREMY COLLIER begins his famous and 
 witty, though dreadfully overdone, Short View 
 of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English 
 Stage with the following spirited words : 
 
 The business of Plays is to recommend Virtue and dis- 
 countenance Vice; to show the Uncertainty of Human 
 Greatness, the sudden turns of Fate, and the unhappy con- 
 clusions of Violence and Injustice; 'tis to expose the singu- 
 larities of Pride and Fancy, to make Folly and Falsehood 
 contemptible, and to bring everything that is ill under Infamy 
 and Neglect. 
 
 He then adds : " This design has been oddly 
 pursued by the Enghsh Stage " ; and so he launches 
 his case. 
 
 Sir John Vanbrugh, who fared very badly at the 
 doctor's hands, rephed — and, on the whole, with 
 great spirit and considerable success — in a pamphlet 
 entitled A Short Vindication of " The Relapse " 
 and " The Provoked Wife " from Immorality and 
 Profaneness. In this reply he strikes out this 
 bold apophthegm: 
 
 The business of Comedy is to show people what they should 
 do, by representing them upon the stage, doing what they 
 should not. 
 
 He continues with much good sense : 
 
 Nor is there any necessity that a philosopher should stand 
 by, like an interpreter at a puppet-show, to explain the moral 
 to the audience. The mystery is seldom so deep but the 
 pit and boxes can dive into it, and 'tis their example out of 
 
 107
 
 io8 SIR JOHN VANBRUGH 
 
 the playhouse that chiefly influences the galleries. The stage 
 is a glass for the world to view itself in; people ought, there- 
 fore, to see themselves as they are; if it makes their faces 
 too fair, they won't know they are dirty, and, by consequence, 
 will neglect to wash them. If, therefore, I have showed 
 " Constant " upon the stage what generally the thing called 
 a fine gentleman is off it, I think I have done what I should 
 do. I have laid open his vices as well as his virtues; 'tis 
 the business of the audience to observe where his flaws 
 lessen his value, and, by considering the deformity of his 
 blemishes, become sensible how much a finer thing he would 
 be without them. 
 
 It is impossible to improve upon these instruc- 
 tions; they are admirable. The only pity is that, 
 as, naturally enough, Sir John wrote his plays 
 first, and defended them afterwards, he had not 
 bestowed a thought upon the subject until the 
 angry parson gave him check. Vanbrugh, like 
 most dramatists of his calibre, wrote to please 
 the town, without any thought of doing good or 
 harm. The two things he wanted were money and 
 a reputation for wit. To lecture and scold him as 
 if he had degraded some high and holy office was 
 ridiculous. Collier had an excellent case, for there 
 can be no doubt that the dramatists he squinted 
 at were worse than they had any need to be. But 
 it is impossible to read Collier's two small books 
 without a good many pishes and pshaws ! He was 
 a clericalist of an aggressive type. You cannot 
 withhold your sympathy from Vanbrugh's remark: 
 
 The reader may here be pleased to take notice what this 
 gentleman would construe profaneness if he were once in 
 the saddle with a good pair of spurs upon his heels. 
 
 Now that Evangelicalism has gone out of fashion, 
 we no longer hear denunciations of stage-plays. 
 High Church parsons crowd the Lyceum, and lead 
 the laughter in less dignified if more amusing
 
 SIR JOHN VANBRUGH 109 
 
 resorts. But, for all that, there is a case to be 
 made against the cheerful playhouse, but not 
 by me. 
 
 As for Sir John Vanbrugh, his two well-known 
 plays, The Relapse and The Provok'd Wife, are 
 most excellent reading, Jeremy Collier notwith- 
 standing. They must be read with the easy toler- 
 ance, the amused benignity, the scornful philosophy 
 of a Christian of the Dr. Johnson type. You must 
 not probe your laughter deep; you must forget 
 for awhile your probationary state, and remember 
 that, after all, the thing is but a play. Sir John 
 has a great deal of wit of that genuine kind which 
 is free from modishness. He reads freshly. He 
 also has ideas. In The Provoked Wife, which was 
 acted for the first time in the early part of 1697, 
 there appears the Philosophy of Clothes (thus 
 forestaUing Swift), and also an early conception 
 of Carlyle's stupendous image of a naked House 
 of Lords. This occurs in a conversation between 
 Heartfree and Constant, which concludes thus: 
 
 Heartfree. Then for her outside — I consider it merely as 
 an outside — she has a thin, tiffany covering over just such 
 stuff as you and I are made on. As for her motion, her mien, 
 her air, and all those tricks, I know they affect you mightily. 
 If you should see your mistress at a coronation, dragging her 
 peacock's train, with all her state and insolence about her, 
 'twould strike you with all the awful thoughts that heaven 
 itself could pretend to from you; whereas I turn the whole 
 matter into a jest, and suppose her strutting in the selfsame 
 stately manner, with nothing on her but her stays and her 
 under, scanty-quilted petticoat. 
 
 Constant. Hold thy profane tongue! for I'll hear no more. 
 
 The Relapse must, I think, be pronounced Van- 
 brugh's best comedy. Lord Foppington is a 
 humorous conception, and the whole dialogue is
 
 no SIR JOHN VANBRUGH 
 
 animated and to the point. One sees where 
 Sheridan got his style. There are more brains, 
 if less sparkle, in Vanbrugh's repartees than in 
 Sheridan's. 
 
 Berinthia. I have had so much discourse with her, that I 
 beUeve, were she once cured of her fondness to her husband, 
 the fortress of her virtue would not be so impregnable as she 
 fancies. 
 
 Worthy. What! she runs, I'll warrant you, into that 
 common mistake of fond wives, who conclude themselves 
 virtuous because they can refuse a man they don't like when 
 they have got one they do. 
 
 Berinthia. True; and, therefore, I think 'tis a presumptuous 
 thing in a woman to assume the name of virtuous till she has 
 heartily hated her husband and been soundly in love with 
 somebody else. 
 
 A handsome edition of Vanbrugh's Plays has 
 recently appeared, edited by Mr. W. C. Ward 
 (Lawrence and Bullen), who has prepared an 
 excellent Life of his author. 
 
 Vanbrugh was, as all the world knows, the 
 architect of Blenheim Palace, as he also was of 
 Castle Howard. He became Comptroller of Works 
 in the reign of Queen Anne, and was appointed by 
 King George Surveyor of the Works at Greenwich 
 Hospital, in the neighbourhood of which he had 
 property of his own. His name is still familiar in 
 the ears of the respectable inhabitants of Black- 
 heath. But what is mysterious is how and where 
 he acquired such skill as he possessed in his pro- 
 fession. His father, Giles Vanbrugh, had nineteen 
 children, of whom thirteen appear to have lived 
 for some length of time, and of John's education 
 nothing precise is known. When nineteen he went 
 into France, where he remained some years. 
 
 During this period, observes Mr. Ward, " it may 
 be presumed he laid the foundation of that skill in
 
 SIR JOHN VANBRUGH iii 
 
 architecture he afterwards so eminently displayed; 
 at least, there is no subsequent period of his life to 
 which we can, with equal probability, ascribe his 
 studies in that art." 
 
 Later on, Mr. Ward says : 
 
 The year 1702 presents our author in a new character. 
 Of his architectural studies we know absohitely nothing, 
 unless we may accept Swift's account, who pretends that 
 Vanbrugh acquired the rudiments of the art by watching 
 children building houses of cards or clay. But this was pro- 
 bably ironical. However he came by his skill, in 1702 he 
 stepped into sudden fame as the architect of Castle Howard. 
 
 It is indeed extraordinary that a man should 
 have undertaken such big jobs as Castle Howard 
 and Blenheim without leaving any trace whatever 
 of the means by which he became credited with the 
 power to execute them. Mr. Pecksniff got an occa- 
 sional pupil and premium, but, so far as I know, 
 he never designed so much as a parish pump. 
 Blenheim is exposed to a good deal of criticism, 
 but nobody can afford to despise either it or Castle 
 Howard, and it seems certain that the original 
 plans and elevations of both structures were 
 prepared by the author of ^he Relapse and The 
 Provoked Wife himself. Of course, there may have 
 been a ghost, but if there had been, the Duchess 
 of Marlborough, who was soon at loggerheads with 
 her architect, would probably have dragged it into 
 the light of day. 
 
 The wits made great fun of their distinguished 
 colleague's feats in brick and mortar. It was not 
 usually permissible for a literary gentleman to be 
 anything else, unless, indeed, a divine like Dr. 
 Swift, whose satirical verses on the small house 
 Vanbrugh built for himself in Whitehall are well
 
 112 SIR JOHN VANBRUGH 
 
 known. They led to a coolness, and no one need 
 wonder. After the architect's death the divine 
 apologised and expressed regret. 
 The well-known epigram — 
 
 Under this stone, reader, survey 
 Dead Sir John Vanbrugh's house of clay: 
 Lie heavy on him, Earth, for he 
 Laid many heavy loads on thee — 
 
 is the composition of another doctor of divinity 
 — Dr. Abel Evans — and was probably prompted 
 by envy. 
 
 Amongst other things, Vanbrugh was a Herald, 
 and in that capacity visited Hanover in 1706, and 
 helped to invest the Electoral Prince, afterwards 
 George H., with the Order of the Garter. Van- 
 brugh's personality is not clearly revealed to us 
 anywhere, but he appears to have been a pleasant 
 companion and witty talker. He married late 
 in life, and of three children only one survived, 
 to be killed at Fontenoy. He himself died in 
 1726, in his sixty-third year, of a quinsy. His 
 widow survived him half a century, thus affording 
 another proof, if proof be needed, that no man 
 is indispensable.
 
 DR. JOHNSON 
 
 1887 
 
 IF we should ever take occasion to say of Dr. 
 Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare what he him- 
 self said of a similar production of the poet 
 Rowe, " that it does not discover much profundity 
 or penetration," we ought in common fairness 
 always to add that nobody else has ever written 
 about Shakespeare one-half so entertainingly. If 
 this statement be questioned, let the doubter, 
 before reviling me, re-read the preface, and if, 
 after he has done so, he still demurs, we shall be 
 content to withdraw the observation, which, in- 
 deed, has only been made for the purpose of 
 introducing a quotation from the preface itself. 
 
 In that document. Dr. Johnson, with his un- 
 rivalled stateliness, writes as follows : " The poet 
 of whose works I have undertaken the revision 
 may now begin to assume the dignity of an ancient, 
 and claim the privilege of established fame and 
 prescriptive veneration. He has long outlived his 
 century, the term commonly fixed as the test of 
 literary merit." 
 
 The whirligig of time has brought in his revenges. 
 The Doctor himself has been dead his century. He 
 died on the 13th of December, 1784. Come, let us 
 criticise him. 
 
 Our qualifications for this high office need not be 
 investigated curiously. 
 
 I 113 H
 
 114 ^^' JOHNSON 
 
 " Criticism," writes Johnson in the 6oth Idler, 
 " is a study by which men grow important and 
 formidable at a very small expense. The power 
 of invention has been conferred by nature upon 
 few, and the labour of learning those sciences 
 which may by mere labour be obtained, is too 
 great to be wilHngly endured; but every man 
 can exert such judgment as he has upon the works 
 of others; and he whom nature has made weak, 
 and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his 
 vanity by the name of a critick." 
 
 To proceed with our task by the method of 
 comparison is to pursue a course open to grave 
 objection, yet it is forced upon us when we find, 
 as we lately did, a writer in the Times newspaper, 
 in the course of a not very discriminating review 
 of Mr. Froude's recent volumes, casually remark- 
 ing, as if it admitted of no more doubt than the 
 day's price of consols, that Carlyle was a greater 
 man than Johnson. It is a good thing to be posi- 
 tive. To be positive in your opinions and selfish 
 in your habits is the best recipe, if not for happi- 
 ness, at all events for that far more attainable 
 commodity, comfort, with which we are acquainted. 
 " A noisy man," sang poor Cowper, who could not 
 bear anything louder than the hissing of a tea-urn, 
 " a noisy man is always in the right," and a positive 
 man can seldom be proved wrong. Still, in litera- 
 ture it is very desirable to preserve a moderate 
 measure of independence, and we, therefore, make 
 bold to ask whether it is as plain as the " old hill 
 of Howth," that Carlyle was a greater man than 
 Johnson? Is not the precise contrary the truth? 
 No abuse of Carlyle need be looked for here or
 
 DR. JOHNSON 115 
 
 from me. When a man of genius and of letters 
 happens to have any striking virtues, such as 
 purity, temperance, honesty, the novel task of 
 dwelling on them has such attraction for us, that 
 we are content to leave the elucidation of his 
 faults to his personal friends, and to stern, un- 
 bending moralists like Mr. Edmund Yates and 
 the World newspaper.^ To love Carlyle is, thanks 
 to Mr. Froude's superhuman ideal of friendship, 
 a task of much heroism, almost meriting a pension; 
 still it is quite possible for the candid and truth- 
 loving soul. But a greater than Johnson he most 
 certainly was not. 
 
 There is a story in Boswell of an ancient beggar- 
 woman who, whilst asking an alms of the Doctor, 
 described herself to him, in a lucky moment for 
 her pocket, as " an old struggler." Johnson, his 
 biographer tells us, was visibly affected. The 
 phrase stuck to his memory, and was frequently 
 applied to himself. " I too," so he would say, " am 
 an old struggler." So too, in all conscience, was 
 Carlyle. The struggles of Johnson have long been 
 historical; those of Carlyle have just become so. 
 We are interested in both. To be indifferent would 
 be inhuman. Both men had great endowments, 
 tempestuous natures, hard lots. They were 
 not amongst Dame Fortune's favourites. They 
 had to fight their way. What they took they 
 took by storm. But — and here is a difference 
 indeed — Johnson came off victorious, Carlyle 
 did not. 
 
 Boswell's book is an arch of triumph, through 
 
 > " The late Mr. Carlyle was a brute and a boor." — -The World, 
 October 29th, 1884.
 
 ii6 DR. JOHNSON 
 
 which, as we read, we see his hero passing into 
 eternal fame, to take up his place with those 
 
 Dead but sceptred sovereigns who still rule 
 Our spirits from their urns. 
 
 Fronde's book is a tomb over which the lovers 
 of Carlyle's genius will never cease to shed tender 
 but regretful tears. 
 
 We doubt whether there is in English literature 
 a more triumphant book than Boswell's. What 
 materials for tragedy are wanting ? Johnson was 
 a man of strong passions, unbending spirit, violent 
 temper, as poor as a church-mouse, and as proud 
 as the proudest of Church dignitaries; endowed 
 with the strength of a coal-heaver, the courage 
 of a lion, and the tongue of Dean Swift, he could 
 knock down booksellers and silence bargees; he 
 was melancholy almost to madness, " radically 
 wretched," indolent, blinded, diseased. Poverty 
 was long his portion; not that genteel poverty 
 that is sometimes behindhand with its rent, but 
 that hungry poverty that does not know where 
 to look for its dinner. Against all these things 
 had this "old struggler " to contend; over all 
 these things did this " old struggler " prevail. 
 Over even the fear of death, the giving up of 
 this " intellectual being," which had haunted his 
 gloomy fancy for a lifetime, he seems finally to 
 have prevailed, and to have met his end as a 
 brave man should. 
 
 Carlyle, writing to his wife, says, and truthfully 
 enough, " The more the devil worries me the more 
 I wring him by the nose "; but then if the devil's 
 was the only nose that was wrung in the transac-
 
 DR. JOHNSON 117 
 
 tion, why need Carlyle cry out so loud ? After 
 buffeting one's way through the storm-tossed pages 
 of Froude's Carlyle — in which the universe is 
 stretched upon the rack because food disagrees 
 with man and cocks crow — with what thankful- 
 ness and reverence do we read once again the 
 letter in which Johnson tells Mrs. Thrale how he 
 has been called to endure, not dyspepsia or sleep- 
 lessness, but paralysis itself: 
 
 On Monday I sat for my picture, and walked a considerable 
 way with little inconvenience. In the afternoon and evening 
 I felt myself light and easy, and began to plan schemes of 
 life. Thus I went to bed, and, in a short time, waked and 
 sat up, as has long been my custom; when I felt a confusion 
 in my head which lasted, I suppose, about half a minute; 
 I was alarmed, and prayed God that however much He might 
 afflict my body He would spare my understanding. . . . 
 Soon after I perceived that I had suffered a paralytic stroke, 
 and that my speech was taken from me. I had no pain, and 
 so little dejection, in this dreadful state, that I wondered at 
 my own apathy, and considered that perhaps death itself, 
 when it should come, would excite less horror than seems now 
 to attend it. In order to rouse the vocal organs I took two 
 drams. ... I then went to bed, and, strange as it may 
 seem, I think, slept. When I saw light it was time I should 
 contrive what I should do. Though God stopped my speech. 
 He left me my hand. I enjoyed a mercy which was not granted 
 to my dear friend Lawrence, who now perhaps overlooks 
 me, as I am writing, and rejoices that I have what he wanted. 
 My first note was necessarily to my servant, who came in 
 talking, and could not immediately comprehend why he 
 should read what I put into his hands. . . . How this will 
 be received by you I know not. I hope you will sympathise 
 with me; but perhaps 
 
 " My mistress, gracious, mild, and good. 
 Cries — Is he dumb ? 'Tis time he shou'd." 
 
 I suppose you may wish to know how my disease is treated 
 by the physicians. They put a blister upon my back, and two 
 from my ear to my throat, one on a side. The blister on the 
 back has done little, and those on the throat have not risen. 
 I bulhed and bounced (it sticks to our last sand), and com- 
 pelled the apothecary to make his salve according to the 
 Edinburgh dispensatory, that it might adhere better. I have
 
 ii8 DR. JOHNSON 
 
 now two on my own prescription. They likewise give me 
 salt of hartshorn, which I take with no great confidence; 
 but I am satisfied that what can be done is done for me. I 
 am almost ashamed of this querulous letter, but now it is 
 written let it go. 
 
 This is indeed tonic and bark for the mind. 
 
 If, irritated by a comparison that ought never 
 to have been thrust upon us, we ask why it is that 
 the reader of Boswell finds it as hard to help loving 
 Johnson as the reader of Froude finds it hard to 
 avoid disliking Carlyle, the answer must be that 
 whilst the elder man of letters was full to over- 
 flowing with the milk of human kindness, the 
 younger one was full to overflowing with some- 
 thing not nearly so nice; and that whilst Johnson 
 was pre-eminently a reasonable man, reasonable 
 in all his demands and expectations, Carlyle was 
 the most unreasonable mortal that ever exhausted 
 the patience of nurse, mother, or wife. 
 
 Of Dr. Johnson's affectionate nature nobody has 
 written with nobler appreciation than Carlyle him- 
 self. " Perhaps it is this Divine feeling of affection, 
 throughout manifested, that principally attracts us 
 to Johnson. A true brother of men is he, and filial 
 lover of the earth." 
 
 The day will come when it will be recognised 
 that Carlyle, as a critic, is to be judged by what 
 he himself corrected for the press, and not by 
 splenetic entries in diaries, or whimsical extrava- 
 gances in private conversation. 
 
 Of Johnson's reasonableness nothing need be 
 said, except that it is patent everywhere. His 
 wife's judgment was a sound one — " He is the 
 most sensible man I ever met." 
 
 As for his brutality, of which at one time we
 
 DR. JOHNSON 119 
 
 used to hear a great deal, we cannot say of it what 
 Hookham Frere said of Landor's immoraHty, that 
 
 it was 
 
 Mere imaginary classicality 
 Wholly devoid of criminal reality. 
 
 It was nothing of the sort. Dialectically the great 
 Doctor was a great brute. The fact is he had so 
 accustomed himself to wordy warfare, that he lost 
 all sense of moral responsibility, and cared as little 
 for men's feehngs as a Napoleon did for their lives. 
 When the battle was over, the Doctor frequently 
 did what no soldier ever did that I have heard tell 
 of, apologised to his victims and drank wine or 
 lemonade with them. It must also be remembered 
 that for the most part his victims sought him out. 
 They came to be tossed and gored. And after all, 
 are they so much to be pitied? They have our 
 sympathy, and the Doctor has our applause. I am 
 not prepared to say, with the simpering fellow with 
 weak legs whom David Copperfield met at Mr. 
 Waterbrook's dinner table, that I would sooner be 
 knocked down by a man with blood than picked 
 up by a man without any; but, argumentatively 
 speaking, I think it would be better for a man's 
 reputation to be knocked down by Dr. Johnson 
 than picked up by Mr. Froude. 
 
 Johnson's claim to be the best of our talkers 
 cannot, on our present materials, be contested. 
 For the most part we have only talk about other 
 talkers. Johnson's is matter of record. Carlyle no 
 doubt was a great talker — no man talked against 
 talk or broke silence to praise it more eloquently 
 than he, but unfortunately none of it is in evidence. 
 All that is given us is a sort of Commination Service
 
 I20 DR. JOHNSON 
 
 writ large. We soon weary of it. Man does not live 
 by curses alone. 
 
 An unhappier prediction of a boy's future was 
 surely never made than that of Johnson's by his 
 cousin, Mr. Cornelius Ford, who said to the infant 
 Samuel, " You will make your way the more easily 
 in the world as you are content to dispute no man's 
 claim to conversation excellence, and they will, 
 therefore, more willingly allow your pretensions as 
 a writer." Unfortunate Mr. Ford! The man never 
 breathed whose claim to conversation excellence 
 Dr. Johnson did not dispute on every possible 
 occasion, whilst, just because he was admittedly 
 so good a talker, his pretensions as a writer have 
 been occasionally slighted. 
 
 Johnson's personal character has generally been 
 allowed to stand high. It, however, has not been 
 submitted to recent tests. To be the first to " smell 
 a fault " is the pride of the modern biographer. 
 Boswell's artless pages afford useful hints not 
 lightly to be disregarded. During some portion of 
 Johnson's married life he had lodgings, first at 
 Greenwich, afterwards at Hampstead. But he 
 did not always go home o' nights; sometimes 
 preferring to roam the streets with that vulgar 
 ruffian Savage, who was certainly no fit company 
 for him. He once actually quarrelled with " Tetty," 
 who, despite her ridiculous name, was a very 
 sensible woman with a very sharp tongue, and for 
 a season, like stars, they dwelt apart. Of the real 
 merits of this dispute we must resign ourselves to 
 ignorance. The materials for its discussion do not 
 exist; even Croker could not find them. Neither 
 was our great moralist as sound as one would have
 
 DR. JOHNSON 121 
 
 liked to see him in the matter of the payment of 
 small debts. When he came to die, he remembered 
 several of these outstanding accounts; but what 
 assurance have we that he remembered them all ? 
 One sum of ^lo he sent across to the honest fellow 
 from whom he had borrowed it, with an apology 
 for his delay; which, since it had extended over 
 a period of twenty years, was not superfluous. I 
 wonder whether he ever repaid Mr. Dilly the guinea 
 he once borrowed of him to give to a very small boy 
 who had just been apprenticed to a printer. If he 
 did not, it was a great shame. That he was indebted 
 to Sir Joshua in a small loan is apparent from the 
 fact that it was one of his three dying requests to 
 that great man that he should release him from it, 
 as, of course, the most amiable of painters did. 
 The other two requests, it will be remembered, 
 were to read his Bible, and not to use his brush 
 on Sundays. The good Sir Joshua gave the desired 
 promises with a full heart, for these two great men 
 loved one another; but subsequently discovered 
 the Sabbatical restriction not a little irksome, and 
 after a while resumed his former practice, arguing 
 with himself that the Doctor really had no business 
 to extract any such promise. The point is a nice 
 one, and perhaps ere this the two friends have met 
 and discussed it in the Elysian fields. If so, I hope 
 the Doctor, grown " angelical," kept his temper 
 with the mild shade of Reynolds better than on 
 the historical occasion when he discussed with him 
 the question of " strong drinks." 
 
 Against Garrick, Johnson undoubtedly cherished 
 a smouldering grudge, which, however, he never 
 allowed anyone but himself to fan into flame. His
 
 122 DR. JOHNSON 
 
 pique was natural. Garrick had been his pupil at 
 Edial, near Lichfield; they had come up to town 
 together with an easy united fortune of fourpence 
 — " current coin o' the realm." Garrick soon had 
 the world at his feet and garnered golden grain. 
 Johnson became famous too, but remained poor 
 and dingy. Garrick surrounded himself with what 
 only money can buy, good pictures and rare books. 
 Johnson cared nothing for pictures — how should 
 he? he could not see them; but he did care a 
 great deal about books, and the pernickety little 
 player was chary about lending his splendidly 
 bound rarities to his quondam preceptor. Our 
 sympathies in this matter are entirely with Garrick; 
 Johnson was one of the best men that ever lived, 
 but not to lend books to. Like Lady Slattern, he 
 had a " most observant thumb." But Garrick had 
 no real cause for complaint. Johnson may have 
 soiled his fohos and sneered at his trade, but in 
 life Johnson loved Garrick, and in death embalmed 
 his memory in a sentence which can only die with 
 the Enghsh language : " I am disappointed by 
 that stroke of death which has eclipsed the gaiety 
 of nations, and impoverished the public stock of 
 harmless pleasure." 
 
 Will it be beheved that puny critics have been 
 found to quarrel with this colossal comphment on 
 the poor pretext of its falsehood ? Garrick's death, 
 urge these dullards, could not possibly have echpsed 
 the gaiety of nations, since he had retired from the 
 stage months previous to his demise. When will 
 mankind learn that literature is one thing, and 
 sworn testimony another ? 
 
 Johnson's relations with Burke were of a more
 
 DR. JOHNSON 123 
 
 crucial character. The author of Rasselas and The 
 English Dictionary can never have been really 
 jealous of Garrick, or in the very least desirous 
 of "bringing down the house"; but Burke had 
 done nobler things than that. He had made politics 
 philosophical, and had at least tried to cleanse them 
 from the dust and cobwebs of party. Johnson, 
 though he had never sat in the House of Commons, 
 had yet, in his capacity of an unauthorised reporter, 
 put into the mouths of honourable members much 
 better speeches than ever came out of them, and 
 it is no secret that he would have liked to make a 
 speech or two on his own account. Burke had made 
 many. Harder still to bear, there were not wanting 
 good judges to say that, in their opinion, Burke 
 was a better talker than the great Samuel himself. 
 To cap it all, was not Burke a " vile Whig " ? The 
 ordeal was an unusually trying one. Johnson 
 emerges triumphant. 
 
 Though by no means disposed to hear men 
 made much of, he always listened to praise of 
 Burke with a boyish dehght. He never wearied 
 of it. When any new proof of Burke's intellectual 
 prowess was brought to his notice, he would 
 exclaim exultingly, " Did we not always say he 
 was a great man ? " And yet how admirably did 
 this " poor scholar " preserve his independence 
 and equanimity of mind! It was not easy to 
 dazzle the Doctor. What a satisfactory story 
 that is of Burke showing Johnson over his fine 
 estate at Beaconsfield, and expatiating in his 
 exuberant style on its " hberties, privileges, ease- 
 ments, rights, and advantages," and of the old 
 Doctor, the tenant of " a two-pair back " some-
 
 124 DR. JOHNSON 
 
 where off Fleet Street, peering cautiously about, 
 criticising everything, and observing with much 
 coolness : 
 
 Non equidem invideo, miror magis. 
 
 A friendship like this could be disturbed but by 
 death, and accordingly we read: 
 
 Mr. Langton one day during Johnson's last illness found 
 Mr. Burke and four or five more friends sitting with Johnson. 
 Mr. Burke said to him, " I am afraid, sir, such a number of 
 us may be oppressive to you." " No, sir," said Johnson, " it 
 is not so; and I must be in a wretched state indeed when 
 your company would not be a delight to me." Mr. Burke, 
 in a tremulous voice, expressive of being very tenderly affected, 
 replied, " My dear sir, you have always been too good to me." 
 Immediately afterwards he went away. This was the last 
 circumstance in the acquaintance of these two eminent men. 
 
 But this is a well-worn theme, though, like some 
 other well-worn themes, still profitable for edifica- 
 tion or rebuke. A hundred years can make no 
 difference to a character like Johnson's, or to a 
 biography like Boswell's. We are not to be robbed 
 of our conviction that this man, at all events, was 
 both great and good. 
 
 Johnson the author is not always fairly treated. 
 Phrases are convenient things to hand about, and 
 it is as little the custom to inquire into their truth 
 as it is to read the letterpress on banknotes. We 
 are content to count banknotes, and to repeat 
 phrases. One of these phrases is, that whilst every- 
 body reads Boswell, nobody reads Johnson. The 
 facts are otherwise. Everybody does not read 
 Boswell, and a great many people do read Johnson. 
 If it be asked, What do the general public know of 
 Johnson's nine volumes octavo ? I reply, Beshrew 
 the general public! What in the name of the
 
 DR. JOHNSON 125 
 
 Bodleian has the general public got to do with 
 literature ? The general public subscribes to Mudie, 
 and has its intellectual, like its lacteal sustenance, 
 sent round to it in carts. On Saturdays these carts, 
 laden with " recent works in circulation," traverse 
 the Uxbridge Road; on Wednesdays they toil up 
 Highgate Hill, and if we may believe the reports 
 of travellers, are occasionally seen rushing through 
 the wilds of Camberwell and bumping over Black- 
 heath. It is not a question of the general public, 
 but of the lover of letters. Do Mr. Browning, Mr. 
 Arnold, Mr. Lowell, Mr. Trevelyan, Mr. Stephen, 
 Mr. Morley, know their Johnson ? " To doubt 
 would be disloyalty." And what these big men 
 know in their big way hundreds of little men know 
 in their little way. We have no writer with a more 
 genuine literary flavour about him than the great 
 Cham of literature. No man of letters loved letters 
 better than he. He knew hterature in all its 
 branches — he had read books, he had written 
 books, he had sold books, he had bought books, 
 and he had borrowed them. Sluggish and inert in 
 all other directions, he pranced through Hbraries. 
 He loved a catalogue; he delighted in an index. 
 He was, to employ a happy phrase of Dr. Holmes, 
 at home amongst books, as a stable-boy is amongst 
 horses. He cared intensely about the future of 
 literature and the fate of literary men. " I respect 
 Millar," he once exclaimed; "he has raised the 
 price of literature." Now Millar was a Scotchman. 
 Even Home Tooke was not to stand in the pillory : 
 " No, no, the dog has too much hterature for that." 
 The only time the author of Rasselas met the 
 author of the Wealth of Nations witnessed a painful
 
 126 DR. JOHNSON 
 
 scene. The English morahst gave the Scotch one 
 the He direct, and the Scotch moralist applied to 
 the English one a phrase which would have done 
 discredit to the lips of a costermonger ; ^ but this 
 notwithstanding, when Boswell reported that Adam 
 Smith preferred rhyme to blank verse, Johnson 
 hailed the news as enthusiastically as did Cedric 
 the Saxon the English origin of the bravest knights 
 in the retinue of the Norman king. " Did Adam 
 say that? " he shouted; " I love him for it. I 
 could hug him! " Johnson no doubt honestly 
 believed he held George III. in reverence, but 
 really he did not care a pin's fee for all the crowned 
 heads of Europe. All his reverence was reserved 
 for " poor scholars." When a small boy in a wherry, 
 on whom had devolved the arduous task of rowing 
 Johnson and his biographer across the Thames, 
 said he would give all he had to know about the 
 Argonauts, the Doctor was much pleased, and gave 
 him, or got Boswell to give him, a double fare. He 
 was ever an advocate of the spread of knowledge 
 amongst all classes and both sexes. His devotion 
 to letters has received its fitting reward, the love 
 and respect of all " lettered hearts." 
 
 Considering him a little more in detail, we find 
 it plain that he was a poet of no mean order. His 
 resonant lines, informed as they often are with the 
 force of their author's character — ^his strong sense, 
 his fortitude, his gloom — take possession of the 
 memory, and suffuse themselves through one's 
 entire system of thought. A poet spouting his own 
 
 1 Anyone who does not wish this story to be true, will find good 
 reasons for disbelieving it stated in Mr. Napier's edition of Boswell, 
 vol. iv. p. 385,
 
 DR. JOHNSON 127 
 
 verses is usually a figure to be avoided; but one 
 could be content to be a hundred and thirty next 
 birthday to have heard Johnson recite, in his full 
 sonorous voice, and with his stately elocution, The 
 Vanity of Human Wishes. When he came to the 
 following lines, he usually broke down, and who 
 can wonder ? — 
 
 Proceed, illustrious youth, 
 And virtue guaxd thee to the throne of truth ! 
 Yet should thy soul indulge the gen'rous heat 
 Till captive science yields her last retreat ; 
 Should reason guide thee with her brightest ray. 
 And pour on misty doubt resistless day; 
 Should no false kindness lure to loose delight. 
 Nor praise relax, nor difficulty fright ; 
 Should tempting novelty thy cell refrain. 
 And sloth effuse her opiate fumes in vain ; 
 Should beauty blunt on fops her fatal dart. 
 Nor claim the triumph of a lettered heart; 
 Should no disease thy torpid veins invade. 
 Nor melancholy's phantoms haunt thy shade; 
 Yet hope not life from grief or danger free. 
 Nor think the doom of man revers'd for thee. 
 Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes, 
 And pause a while from letters to be wise; 
 There mark what ills the scholar's life assail. 
 Toil, envy, want, the patron and the gaol. 
 See nations, slowly wise and meanly just. 
 To buried merit raise the tardy bust. 
 If dreams yet flatter, once again attend. 
 Hear Lydiat's life, and Galileo's end. 
 
 If this be not poetry, may the name perish! 
 
 In another style, the stanzas on the young heir's 
 majority have such great merit as to tempt one to 
 say that the author of The Jolly Beggars, Robert 
 Burns himself, might have written them. Here 
 are four of them : 
 
 Loosen'd from the minor's tether. 
 
 Free to mortgage or to sell; 
 Wild as wind and light as feather, 
 
 Bid the sons of thrift farewell.
 
 128 DR. JOHNSON 
 
 Call the Betseys, Kates, and Jennies, 
 
 All the names that banish care. 
 Lavish of your grandsire's guineas. 
 
 Show the spirit of an heir. 
 
 Wealth, my lad, was made to wander. 
 
 Let it wander as it will ; 
 Call the jockey, call the pander, 
 
 Bid them come and take their fill. 
 
 When the bonny blade carouses, 
 
 Pockets full and spirits high — 
 What are acres ? what are houses ? 
 
 Only dirt — or wet or dry. 
 
 Johnson's prologues, and his hnes on the death 
 of Robert Levett, are well known. Indeed, it is 
 only fair to say that our respected friend, the 
 General Public, frequently has Johnsonian tags 
 on its tongue: 
 
 Slow rises worth by poverty depressed. 
 
 The unconquered lord of pleasure and of pain. 
 
 He left the name at which the world grew pale. 
 To point a moral or adorn a tale. 
 
 Death, kind nature's signal of retreat. 
 
 Panting time toiled after him in vain. 
 
 All these are Johnson's, who, though he is not, 
 like Gray, whom he hated so, all quotations, is yet 
 oftener in men's mouths than they perhaps wot of. 
 
 Johnson's tragedy, Irene, need not detain us. 
 It is unreadable; and to quote his own sensible 
 words, " It is useless to criticise what nobody 
 reads." It was indeed the expressed opinion of 
 a contemporary, called Pot, that Irene was the 
 finest tragedy of modern times; but on this judg- 
 ment of Pot's being made known to Johnson,
 
 DR. JOHNSON 129 
 
 he was only heard to mutter, " If Pot says so, Pot 
 Hes," as no doubt he did. 
 
 Johnson's Latin Verses have not escaped the 
 condemnation of scholars. Whose have ? The true 
 mode of critical approach to copies of Latin verse 
 is by the question — How bad are they ? Croker 
 took the opinion of the Marquess Wellesley as to 
 the degree of badness of Johnson's Latin Exercises. 
 Lord Wellesley, as became so distinguished an 
 Etonian, felt the solemnity of the occasion, and, 
 after bargaining for secrecy, gave it as his opinion 
 that they were all very bad, but that some perhaps 
 were worse than others. To this judgment I have 
 nothing to add. 
 
 As a writer of English prose, Johnson has always 
 enjoyed a great, albeit a somewhat awful reputa- 
 tion. In childish memories he is constrained to be 
 associated with dust and dictionaries, and those 
 provoking obstacles to a boy's reading' — " long 
 words." It would be easy to select from Johnson's 
 writings numerous passages written in that essen- 
 tially vicious style to which the name Johnsonese 
 has been cruelly given; but the searcher could not 
 fail to find many passages guiltless of this charge. 
 The characteristics of Johnson's prose style are 
 colossal good sense, though with a strong sceptical 
 bias, good humour, vigorous language, and move- 
 ment from point to point, which can only be 
 compared to the measured tread of a well-drilled 
 company of soldiers. Here is a passage from the 
 Preface to Shakespeare : 
 
 Notes are often necessary, but they are necessary evils. 
 Let him that is yet unacquainted with the powers of Shake- 
 speare, and who desires to feel the highest pleasure that the 
 drama can give, read every play from the first scene to the 
 I I
 
 I30 DR. JOHNSON 
 
 last, with utter negligence of all his commentators. When his 
 fancy is once on the wing, let it not stoop at correction or 
 explanation. When his attention is strongly engaged, let it 
 disdain alike to turn aside to the name of Theobald and of 
 Pope. Let him read on, through brightness and obscurity, 
 through integrity and corruption; let him preserve his com- 
 prehension of the dialogue and his interest in the fable. And 
 when the pleasures of novelty have ceased, let him attempt 
 exactness and read the commentators. 
 
 Where are we to find better sense, or much 
 better Enghsh ? 
 
 In the pleasant art of chaffing an author Johnson 
 has hardly an equal. De Quincey too often overdoes 
 it. Macaulay seldom fails to excite sympathy with 
 his victim. In playfulness Mr. Arnold perhaps 
 surpasses the Doctor, but then the latter's playful- 
 ness is always leonine, whilst Mr. Arnold's is surely, 
 sometimes, just a trifle kittenish. An example, no 
 doubt a very good one, of Johnson's humour must 
 be allowed me. Soame Jenyns, in his book on the 
 Origin of Evil, had imagined that, as we have not 
 only animals for food, but choose some for our 
 diversion, the same privilege may be allowed to 
 beings above us, " who may deceive, torment, or 
 destroy us for the ends only of their own pleasure." 
 
 On this hint writes our merry Doctor as follows : 
 
 I cannot resist the temptation of contemplating this analogy, 
 which I think he might have carried farther, very much to 
 the advantage of his argument. He might have shown that 
 these " hunters, whose game is man," have many sports 
 analogous to our own. As we drown whelps or kittens, they 
 amuse themselves now and then with sinking a ship, and 
 stand round the fields of Blenheim, or the walls of Prague, 
 as we encircle a cockpit. As we shoot a bird flying, they take 
 a man in the midst of his business or pleasure, and knock him 
 down with an apoplexy. Some of them perhaps are virtuosi, 
 and delight in the operations of an asthma, as a human 
 philosopher in the effects of the air-pump. Many a merry 
 bout have these frolick beings at the vicissitudes of an ague, 
 and good sport it is to see a man tumble with an epilepsy, and
 
 DR. JOHNSON 131 
 
 revive, and tumble again, and all this he knows not why. 
 The paroxysms of the gout and stone must undoubtedly 
 make high mirth, especially if the play be a little diversified 
 with the blunders and puzzles of the blind and deaf. . . . 
 One sport the merry malice of these beings has found means 
 of enjoying, to which we have nothing equal or similar. They 
 now and then catch a mortal, proud of his parts, and flattered 
 either by the submission of those who court his kindness, or 
 the notice of those who suffer him to court theirs. A head 
 thus prepared for the reception of false opinions, and the 
 projection of vain designs, they easily fill with idle notions, 
 till, in time, they make their plaything an author; their 
 first diversion commonly begins with an ode or an epistle, 
 then rises perhaps to a political irony, and is at last brought 
 to its height by a treatise of philosophy. Then begins 
 the poor animal to entangle himself in sophisms and to 
 flounder in absurdity. 
 
 The author of the philosophical treatise A Free 
 Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil did 
 not at all enjoy this " merry bout " of the 
 " frolick " Johnson. 
 
 The concluding paragraphs of Johnson's Preface 
 to his Dictionary are historical prose; and if we 
 are anxious to find passages fit to compare with 
 them in the melancholy roll of their cadences and 
 in their grave sincerity and manly emotion, we 
 must, I think, take a flying jump from Dr. Johnson 
 to Dr. Newman. 
 
 For sensible men the world offers no better 
 reading than the Lives of the Poets. They afford 
 an admirable example of the manner of man John- 
 son was. The subject was suggested to him by 
 the booksellers, whom as a body he never abused. 
 Himself the son of a bookseller, he respected 
 their calling. If they treated him with civility, 
 he responded suitably. If they were rude to him, 
 he knocked them down. These worthies chose 
 their own poets. Johnson remained indifferent.
 
 132 DR. JOHNSON 
 
 He knew everybody's poetry, and was always ready 
 to write anybody's Life. If he knew the facts of a 
 poet's hfe — and his knowledge was enormous on 
 such subjects — he found room for them; if he did 
 not, he supplied their place with his own shrewd 
 reflections and sombre philosophy of life. It thus 
 comes about that Johnson is every bit as interest- 
 ing when he is writing about Sprat, or Smith, or 
 Fenton, as he is when he has got Milton or Gray in 
 hand. He is also much less provoking. My own 
 favourite Life is that of Sir Richard Blackmore. 
 
 The poorer the poet the kindlier is the treatment 
 he receives. Johnson kept all his rough words for 
 Shakespeare, Milton, and Gray. 
 
 In this trait, surely an amiable one, he was much 
 resembled by that eminent man the late Sir George 
 Jessel, whose civility to a barrister was always in 
 inverse ratio to the barrister's practice; and whose 
 friendly zeal in helping young and nervous prac- 
 titioners over the stiles of legal difficulty was only 
 equalled by the fiery enthusiasm with which he 
 thrust back the Attorney and Solicitor-General 
 and people of that sort. 
 
 As a political thinker Johnson has not had 
 justice. He has been lightly dismissed as the last 
 of the old-world Tories. He was nothing of the 
 sort. His cast of political thought is shared by 
 thousands to this day. He represents that vast 
 army of electors whom neither canvasser nor 
 caucus has ever yet cajoled or bullied into a 
 polling-booth. Newspapers may scold, platforms 
 may shake; whatever circulars can do may be 
 done, all that placards can tell may be told; but 
 the fact remains that one-third of every con-
 
 DR. JOHNSON 133 
 
 stituency in the realm shares Dr. Johnson's 
 " narcotic indifference," and stays away. 
 
 It is, of course, impossible to reconcile all 
 Johnson's recorded utterances with any one view 
 of anything. When crossed in conversation or 
 goaded by folly he was, like the prophet Habakkuk 
 (according to Voltaire), capable de tout. But his 
 dominant tone about politics was something of 
 this sort. Provided a man lived in a state which 
 guaranteed him private liberty and secured him 
 public order, he was very much of a knave or 
 altogether a fool if he troubled himself further. 
 To go to bed when you wish, to get up when you 
 hke, to eat and drink and read what you choose, 
 to say across your port or your tea whatever occurs 
 to you at the moment, and to earn your living as 
 best you may — this is what Dr. Johnson meant by 
 private hberty. Fleet Street open day and night — 
 this is what he meant by public order. Give a 
 sensible man these, and take all the rest the world 
 goes round. Tyranny was a bugbear. Either the 
 tyranny was bearable, or it was not. If it was 
 bearable, it did not matter; and as soon as it 
 became unbearable the mob cut off the tyrant's 
 head, and wise men went home to their dinner. 
 To views of this sort he gave emphatic utterance 
 on the well-known occasion when he gave Sir Adam 
 Ferguson a bit of his mind. Sir Adam had inno- 
 cently enough observed that the Crown had too 
 much power. Thereupon Johnson: 
 
 Sir, I perceive you are a vile Whig. Why all this childish 
 jealousy of the power of the Crown ? The Crown has not 
 power enough. When I say that all governments are alike, I 
 consider that in no government power can be abused long; 
 mankind will not bear it. If a sovereign oppresses his people.
 
 134 DR. JOHNSON 
 
 they will rise and cut off his head. There is a remedy in human 
 nature against tyranny that will keep us safe under every 
 form of government. 
 
 This is not and never was the language of 
 Toryism. It is a much more intellectual " ism." 
 It is indifferentism. So, too, in his able pamphlet. 
 The False Alarm, which had reference to Wilkes 
 and the Middlesex election, though he no doubt 
 attempts to deal with the constitutional aspect of 
 the question, the real strength of his case is to be 
 found in passages like the following : 
 
 The grievance which has produced all this tempest of 
 outrage, the oppression in which all other oppressions are 
 included, the invasion which has left us no property, the 
 alarm that suffers no patriot to sleep in quiet, is comprised 
 in a vote of the House of Commons, by which the freeholders 
 of Middlesex are deprived of a Briton's birthright — repre- 
 sentation in Parliament. They have, indeed, received the 
 usual writ of election; but that writ, alas! was malicious 
 mockery; they were insulted with the form, but denied the 
 reality, for there was one man excepted from their choice. 
 The character of the man, thus fatally excepted, I have no 
 purpose to delineate. Lampoon itself would disdain to speak 
 ill of him of whom no man speaks well. Every lover of liberty 
 stands doubtful of the fate of posterity, because the chief 
 county in England cannot take its representative from a gaol. 
 
 Temperament was of course at the bottom of 
 this indifference. Johnson was of melancholy 
 humour and profoundly sceptical. Cynical he was 
 not — he loved his fellow-men ; his days were full of 
 
 Little, nameless, unreraerabered acts 
 Of kindness and of love. 
 
 But he was as difficult to rouse to enthusiasm about 
 humanity as is Mr. Justice Stephen. He pitied the 
 poor devils, but he did not believe in them. They 
 were neither happy nor wise, and he saw no reason 
 to believe they would ever become either. " Leave
 
 DR. JOHNSON 135 
 
 me alone," he cried to the sultry mob, bawling 
 " Wilkes and Liberty." " I at least am not ashamed 
 to own that I care for neither the one nor the other." 
 
 No man, however, resented more fiercely than 
 Johnson any unnecessary interference with men 
 who were simply going their own way. The High- 
 landers only knew Gaelic, yet political wiseacres 
 were to be found objecting to their having the 
 Bible in their own tongue. Johnson flew to arms: 
 he wrote one of his monumental letters; the oppo- 
 sition was quelled, and the Gael got his Bible. So 
 too the wicked interference with Irish enterprise, 
 so much in vogue during the last century, in- 
 furiated him. " Sir," he said to Sir Thomas 
 Robinson, " you talk the language of a savage. 
 What, sir! would you prevent any people from 
 feeding themselves, if by any honest means they 
 can do so ? " 
 
 Were Johnson to come to life again, total ab- 
 stainer as he often was, he would, I expect, denounce 
 the principle involved in " Local Option." I am 
 not at all sure he would not borrow a guinea from 
 a bystander and become a subscriber to the 
 "Property Defence League"; and though it is 
 notorious that he never read any book all through, 
 and never could be got to believe that anybody 
 else ever did, he would, I think, read a larger 
 fraction of Mr. Spencer's pamphlet, Man versus 
 the State, than of any other " recent work in cir- 
 culation." The state of the Strand, when two 
 vestries are at work upon it, would, I am sure, 
 drive him into open rebellion. 
 
 As a letter-writer Johnson has great merits. Let 
 no man despise the epistolary art. It is said to be
 
 136 DR. JOHNSON 
 
 extinct. I doubt it. Good letters were always 
 scarce. It does not follow that, because our grand- 
 mothers wrote long letters, they all wrote good 
 ones, or that nobody nowadays writes good letters 
 because most people write bad ones. Johnson wrote 
 letters in two styles. One was monumental — more 
 suggestive of the chisel than the pen. In the other 
 there are traces of the same style, but, like the old 
 Gothic architecture, it has grown domesticated, and 
 become the fit vehicle of plain tidings of joy and 
 sorrow — of affection, wit, and fancy. The letter to 
 Lord Chesterfield is the most celebrated example 
 of the monumental style. From the letters to Mrs. 
 Thrale many good examples of the domesticated 
 style might be selected. One must suffice : 
 
 Queeney has been a good girl, and wrote me a letter. If 
 Burney said she would write, she told you a fib. She writes 
 nothing to me. She can write home fast enough. I have a 
 good mind not to tell her that Dr. Bernard, to whom I had 
 recommended her novel, speaks of it with great commendation, 
 and that the copy which she lent me has been read by Dr. 
 Lawrence three times over. And yet what a gipsy it is. She 
 no more minds me than if I were a Branghton. Pray, speak 
 to Queeney to write again. . . . Now you think yourself 
 the first writer in the world for a letter about nothing. Can 
 you write such a letter as this ? So miscellaneous, with such 
 noble disdain of regularity, like Shakespeare's works; such 
 .graceful negligence of transition, like the ancient enthusiasts. 
 The pure voice of Nature and of Friendship. Now, of whom 
 shall I proceed to speak? of whom but Mrs. Montague? 
 Having mentioned Shakespeare and Nature, does not the 
 naine of Montague force itself upon me ? Such were the 
 transitions of the ancients, which now seem abrupt, because 
 the intermediate idea is lost to modei-n understandings. 
 
 But the extract had better end, for there are 
 (I fear) " modern understandings " who will not 
 perceive the " intermediate idea " between Shake- 
 speare and Mrs. Montague, and to whom even the 
 name of Branghton will suggest no meaning.
 
 DR. JOHNSON 137 
 
 Johnson's literary fame is, in our judgment, as 
 secure as his character. Like the stone which he 
 placed over his father's grave at Lichfield, and 
 which, it is shameful to think, has been removed, 
 it is " too massy and strong " to be ever much 
 affected by the wind and weather of our Hterary 
 atmosphere. " Never," so he wrote to Mrs. Thrale, 
 " let criticisms operate upon your face or your 
 mind; it is very rarely that an author is hurt by 
 his critics. The blaze of reputation cannot be blown 
 out; but it often dies in the socket. From the 
 author of Fitzoshorne's Letters I cannot think myself 
 in much danger. I met him only once, about 
 thirty years ago, and in some small dispute soon 
 reduced him to whistle." Dr. Johnson is in no 
 danger from anybody. None but Gargantua 
 could blow him out, and he still burns brightly 
 in his socket. 
 
 How long this may continue who can say ? It is 
 a far cry to 1985. Science may by that time have 
 squeezed out literature, and the author of the Lives 
 of the Poets may be dimly remembered as an odd 
 fellow who lived in the Dark Ages, and had a very 
 creditable fancy for making chemical experiments. 
 On the other hand, the Spirituahsts may be in 
 possession, in which case the Cock Lane Ghost will 
 occupy more of public attention than Boswell's 
 hero, who will, perhaps, be reprobated as the 
 profane utterer of these idle words : " Suppose 
 I know a man to be so lame that he is absolutely 
 incapable to move himself, and I find him in a 
 different room from that in which I left him, shall 
 I puzzle myself with idle conjectures, that perhaps 
 his nerves have by some unknown change all at
 
 138 DR. JOHNSON 
 
 once become effective ? No, sir, it is clear how he J 
 
 got into a different room — ^he was carried?'' ' 
 
 We here part company with Johnson, bidding 
 him a most affectionate farewell, and leaving him 
 in undisturbed possession of both place and power. 
 His character will bear investigation and some of 
 his books perusal. The latter, indeed, may be sub- 
 mitted to his own test, and there is no truer one. 
 A book, he wrote, should help us either to enjoy 
 life or to endure it. His frequently do both.
 
 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO DR. JOHNSON 
 
 1894 
 
 DR. JOHNSON'S massive shade cannot 
 complain of this generation. We are not 
 all of us — or, indeed, many of us — much 
 after his mind, but, for all that, we worship his 
 memory. Editions of Boswell, old or new, are on 
 every shelf; but more than this, there is a healthy 
 and commendable disposition to recognise that 
 great, surpassingly great, as are the merits of 
 Boswell, still there is such a thing as a detached 
 and separate Johnson. 
 
 It is a good thing every now and again to get 
 rid of Boswell. It is a little ungrateful, but we 
 have Johnson's authority for the statement that 
 we hate our benefactors. After all, even had there 
 been no Boswell, there would have been a Johnson. 
 I will always stick to it that Hawkins's Life is a 
 most readable book. Dr. Birkbeck Hill stands 
 a good chance of being hated some day. We 
 owed him a debt of gratitude already. He has 
 lately added to it by publishing at the Clarendon 
 Press, in two stately volumes, uniform with 
 his great edition of the Life, the Letters of Samuel 
 Johnson, LL.D. 
 
 For a lazy man who loathed writing Dr. Johnson 
 did not do badly — his letters to Mrs. Thrale exceed 
 three hundred. It is not known that he ever wrote 
 a letter to Burke. I cannot quite jump with the 
 
 139
 
 I40 DR. JOHNSON'S GOSPEL 
 
 humour of Dr. Hill's comment on this fact. He 
 observes : " So far as we know, he did not write 
 a single letter to Edmund Burke — ^he wrote more 
 than three hundred to the wife of a Southwark 
 brewer." What has the beer got to do with it ? 
 and why drag in Southwark? Every man knows, 
 without being told, why Johnson wrote three 
 hundred letters to Mrs. Thrale; and as for his 
 not writing to Burke, it is notorious that the 
 Doctor never could be got to write to anybody 
 for information. 
 
 Dr. Hill's two volumes are as dehghtful books 
 as ever issued from the press. In them Dr. Johnson 
 is to be seen in every aspect of his character, whilst 
 a complete study may be made from them of the 
 enormous versatility of his style. It is hard to say 
 what one admires most — the ardour of his affec- 
 tion, the piety of his nature, the friendliness of his 
 disposition, the playfulness of his humour, or his 
 love of learning and of letters. 
 
 What strikes one perhaps most, if you assume 
 a merely critical attitude, is the glorious ease and 
 aptitude of his quotations from ancient and modern 
 writings. Of pedantry there is not a trace. Nothing 
 is forced or dragged in. It is all, apparently, simply 
 inevitable. You do not exclaim as you read, " What 
 a memory the fellow has!" but merely, "How 
 charming it all is! " 
 
 It is not difficult to construct from these two 
 volumes alone the gospel — the familiar, the noble 
 gospel according to Dr. Johnson. It reads somewhat 
 as follows: 
 
 Your father begot you and your mother bore you. Honour 
 them both. Husbands, be faithful to your wives. Wives,
 
 DR. JOHNSON'S GOSPEL 141 
 
 forgive your husbands' unfaithfulness — once. No grown man 
 who is dependent on the will, that is the whim, of another 
 can be happy, and life without enjoyment is intolerable gloom. 
 Therefore, as money means independence and enjoyment, 
 get money, and having got it keep it. A spendthrift is a fool. 
 
 Clear your mind of cant and never debauch your under- 
 standing. The only liberty worth turning out into the street 
 for, is the liberty to do what you like in your own house and 
 to say what you like in your own inn. All work is bondage. 
 
 Never get excited about causes you do not understand, 
 or about people you have never seen. Keep Corsica out of 
 your head. 
 
 Life is a struggle with either poverty or ennui; but it is 
 better to be rich than to be poor. Death is a terrible thing 
 to face. The man who says he is not afraid of it lies. Yet, 
 as murderers have met it bravely on the scaffold, when the 
 time comes so perhaps may I. In the meantime I am horribly 
 afraid. The future is dark. I should like more evidence of 
 the immortality of the soul. 
 
 There is great solace in talk. We — you and I — are ship- 
 wrecked on a wave-swept rock. At any moment one or other 
 of us, perhaps both, may be carried out to sea and lost. For 
 the time being we have a modicum of light and warmth, of 
 meat and drink. Let us constitute ourselves a club, stretch 
 out our legs and talk. We have minds, memories, varied 
 experiences, different opinions. Sir, let us talk, not as men 
 who mock at fate, not with coarse speech or foul tongue, but 
 with a manly mixture of the gloom that admits the inevitable, 
 and the merriment that observes the incongruous. Thus 
 talking we shall learn to love one another, not sentimentally 
 but fundamentally. 
 
 Cultivate your mind, if you happen to have one. Care 
 greatly for books and literature. Venerate poor scholars, 
 but don't shout for " Wilkes and Liberty! " The one is a 
 whoremonger, the other a flatulency. 
 
 If any tyrant prevents your goings out and your comings 
 in, fill your pockets with large stones and kill him as he passes. 
 Then go home and think no more about it. Never theorise 
 about Revolution. Finally, pay your score at your club and 
 your final debt to Nature generously and without casting 
 the account too narrowly. Don't be a prig like Sir John 
 Hawkins, or your own enemy like Bozzy, or a Whig like 
 Burke, or a vile wretch like Rousseau, or pretend to be an 
 atheist like Hume, but be a good fellow, and don't insist upon 
 being remembered more than a month after you are dead. 
 
 This is but the First Lesson. To compose the 
 Second would be a more difficult task and must
 
 142 DR. JOHNSON'S GOSPEL 
 
 not be here attempted. These two volumes of 
 Dr. Hill are endless in their variety. Johnson 
 was gloomy enough, and many of his letters may 
 well move you to tears, but his was ever a human 
 gloom. The year before his death he writes to 
 Mrs. Thrale: 
 
 The black dog I hope always to resist and in time to drive, 
 though I am deprived of almost all those that used to help 
 me. The neighbourhood is impoverished. I had once Richard- 
 son and Lawrence in my reach. Mrs. Allen is dead. My house 
 has lost Levett, a man who took interest in everything and 
 therefore ready at conversation. Mrs. Williams is so weak 
 that she can be a companion no longer. When I rise my 
 breakfast is solitary — the black dog waits to share it; from 
 breakfast to dinner he continues barking, except that Dr. 
 Brocklesby for a little keeps him at a distance. Dinner with 
 a sick woman you may venture to suppose not much better 
 than solitary. After dinner, what remains but to count the 
 clock and hope for that sleep which I can scarce expect ? 
 Night comes at last, and some hours of restlessness and 
 confusion bring me again to a day of solitude. What shall 
 exclude the black dog from an habitation like this ? If I 
 were a little richer I would perhaps take some cheerful female 
 into the house. 
 
 It is a melancholy picture, but the " cheerful 
 female " shoots a ray of light across the gloom. 
 Everyone should add these two volumes to his 
 library, and if he has not a library, let him begin 
 making one with them.
 
 THE JOHNSONIAN LEGEND 
 
 1906 
 
 THE ten handsome volumes which the 
 indefatigable and unresting zeal of Dr. 
 Birkbeck Hill, and the high spirit of the 
 Clarendon Press, have edited, arranged, printed, 
 and published for the benefit of the world and 
 the propagation of the Gospel according to Dr. 
 Johnson are pleasant things to look upon. I hope 
 the enterprise has proved remunerative to those 
 concerned, but I doubt it. The parsimony of the 
 public in the matter of books is pitiful. The ordi- 
 nary purse-carrying Englishman holds in his head 
 a ready-reckoner or scale of charges by which he 
 tests his purchases — so much for a dinner, so much 
 for a bottle of champagne, so much for a trip to 
 Paris, so much for a pair of gloves, and so much 
 for a book. These ten volumes would cost him 
 j^4 9s. 3d. " Whew ! What a price for a book, and 
 where are they to be put, and who is to dust 
 them ? " Idle questions ! As for room, a bicycle 
 takes more room than 1000 books; and as for dust, 
 it is a delusion. You should never dust books. 
 There let it lie until the rare hour arrives when you 
 want to read a particular volume; then warily 
 approach it with a snow-white napkin, take it 
 down from its shelf, and, withdrawing to some 
 back apartment, proceed to cleanse the tome. Dr. 
 Johnson adopted other methods. Every now and 
 
 143
 
 144 THE JOHNSONIAN LEGEND 
 
 again he drew on huge gloves, such as those once 
 worn by hedgers and ditchers, and then, clutching 
 his folios and octavos, he banged and buffeted 
 them together until he was enveloped in a cloud of 
 dust. This violent exercise over, the good doctor 
 restored the volumes, all battered and bruised, to 
 their places, where, of course, the dust resettled 
 itself as speedily as possible. 
 
 Dr. Johnson could make books better than any- 
 body, but his notions of dusting them were primi- 
 tive and erroneous. But the room and the dust 
 are mere subterfuges. The truth is, there is a 
 disinclination to pay ^4 9s. 3d. for the ten volumes 
 containing the complete Johnsonian legend. To 
 quarrel with the public is idiotic and most un- 
 Johnsonian. " Depend upon it, sir," said the Sage, 
 " every state of society is as luxurious as it can be." 
 We all, a handful of misers excepted, spend more 
 money than we can afford upon luxuries, but what 
 those luxuries are to be is largely determined for 
 us by the fashions of our time. If we do not buy 
 these ten volumes, it is not because we would not 
 like to have them, but because we want the money 
 they cost for something we want more. As for 
 dictating to men how they are to spend their 
 money, it were both a folly and an impertinence. 
 
 These ten volumes end Dr. Hill's labours as an 
 editor of Johnsori's Life and Personalia, but did 
 not leave him free. He had set his mind on an 
 edition of the Lives of the Poets. This, to the regret 
 of all who knew him either personally or as a 
 Johnsonian, he did not live to see through the 
 press. But it is soon to appear, and will be a 
 storehouse of anecdote and a miracle of cross-
 
 THE JOHNSONIAN LEGEND 145 
 
 references. A poet who has been dead a century 
 or two is amazing good company — at least, he 
 never fails to be so when Johnson tells us as much 
 of his story as he can remember without undue 
 research, with that irony of his, that vast com- 
 posure, that humorous perception of the greatness 
 and the littleness of human life, that make the 
 brief records of a Sprat, a Walsh, and a Fenton 
 so divinely entertaining. It is an immense testi- 
 mony to the healthiness of the Johnsonian atmo- 
 sphere that Dr. Hill, who breathed it almost 
 exclusively for a quarter of a century and upwards, 
 showed no symptoms either of moral deterioration 
 or physical exhaustion. His appetite to the end 
 was as keen as ever, nor was his temper obviously 
 the worse. The task never became a toil, not even 
 a tease. " You have but two subjects," said 
 Johnson to Boswell : " yourself and myself. I 
 am sick of both." Johnson hated to be talked 
 about, or to have it noticed what he ate or what 
 he had on. For a hundred years now last past he 
 has been more talked about and noticed than 
 anybody else. But Dr. Hill never grew sick of 
 Dr. Johnson. 
 
 The Johnsonian Miscellanies ^ open with the 
 Prayers and Meditations, first published by the 
 Rev. Dr. Strahan in 1785. Strahan was the Vicar 
 of Islington, and into his hands at an early hour 
 one morning Dr. Johnson, then approaching his 
 last days, put the papers, " with instructions for 
 committing them to the press and with a promise 
 to prepare a sketch of his own life to accompany 
 them." This promise the doctor was not able to 
 
 ' Two volumes. Oxford, Clarendon I'ress, 1897. 
 I K
 
 146 THE JOHNSONIAN LEGEND 
 
 keep, and shortly after his death his reverend 
 friend pubHshed the papers just as they were put 
 into his hands. One wonders he had the heart to 
 do it, but the clerical mind is sometimes strangely 
 insensitive to the privacy of thought. But, as 
 in the case of most indelicate acts, you cannot 
 but be glad the thing was done. The original 
 manuscript is at Pembroke College, Oxford. In 
 these Prayers and Meditations we see an awful 
 figure. The solitary Johnson, perturbed, tortured, 
 oppressed, in distress of body and of mind, full 
 of alarms for the future both in this world and 
 the next, teased by importunate and perplexing 
 thoughts, harassed by morbid infirmities, vexed 
 by idle yet constantly recurring scruples, with an 
 inherited melancholy and a threatened sanity, is 
 a gloomy and even a terrible picture, and forms a 
 striking contrast to the social hero, the triumphant 
 dialectician of Boswell, Mrs. Thrale, and Madame 
 D'Arblay. Yet it is reheved by its inherent 
 humanity, its fellowship and feeling. Dr. John- 
 son's piety is delightfully full of human nature — 
 far too full to please the poet Cowper, who wrote 
 of the Prayers and Meditations as follows : 
 
 If it be fair to judge of a book by an extract, I do not 
 wonder that you were so little edified by Johnson's Journal. 
 It is even more ridiculous than was poor Rutty's of flatulent 
 memory. The portion of it given us in this day's paper con- 
 tains not one sentiment worth one farthing, except the last, 
 in which he resolves to bind himself with no more unbidden 
 obligations. Poor man! one would think that to pray for his 
 dead wife and to pinch himself with Church fasts had been 
 almost the whole of his religion. 
 
 It were hateful to pit one man's rehgion against 
 another's, but it is only fair to Dr. Johnson's
 
 THE JOHNSONIAN LEGEND 147 
 
 religion to remember that, odd compound as it 
 was, it saw him through the long struggle of life, 
 and enabled him to meet the death he so honestly 
 feared like a man and a Christian. The Prayers 
 and Meditations may not be an edifying book in 
 Cowper's sense of the word; there is nothing 
 triumphant about it; it is full of infirmities and 
 even absurdities ; but, for all that, it contains more 
 piety than ten thousand religious biographies. Nor 
 must the evidence it contains of weakness be exag- 
 gerated. Beset with infirmities, a lazy dog, as he 
 often declared himself to be, he yet managed to 
 do a thing or two. Here, for example, is an entry: 
 
 29, Easter Eve (1777). 
 I rose and again prayed with reference to my departed wife. 
 I neither read nor went to church, yet can scarcely tell how 
 I have been hindered. I treated with booksellers on a bargain, 
 but the time was not long. 
 
 Too long, perhaps, for Johnson's piety, but short 
 enough to enable the booksellers to make an un- 
 common good bargain for the Lives of the Poets. 
 " As to the terms," writes Mr. Dilly, " it was left 
 entirely to the doctor to name his own; he men- 
 tioned 200 guineas; it was immediately agreed to." 
 The business-like Malone makes the following 
 observation on the transaction: "Had he asked 
 1000, or even 1500, guineas the booksellers, who 
 knew the value of his name, would doubtless have 
 readily given it." Dr. Johnson, though the son of 
 a bookseller, was the least tradesmanlike of authors. 
 The bargain was bad, but the book was good. 
 
 A year later we find this record: 
 
 Moxi^AV, April 20 (1778). 
 After a good night, as I am forced to reckon, I rose season- 
 ably and prayed, using the collect for yesterday. In reviewing
 
 148 THE JOHNSONIAN LEGEND 
 
 my time from Easter, 1777, I find a very melancholy and 
 shameful blank. So little has been done that days and months 
 are without any trace. My health has, indeed, been very 
 much interrupted. My nights have been commonly not only 
 restless but painful and fatiguing. ... I have written a 
 little of the Lives of the Poets, I think, with all my usual vigour. 
 I have made sermons, perhaps, as readily as formerly. My 
 memory is less faithful in retaining names, and, I am afraid, 
 in retaining occurrences. Of this vacillation and vagrancy of 
 mind I impute a great part to a fortuitous and unsettled life, 
 and therefore purpose to spend my life with more method. 
 
 This year the 28th of March passed away without memorial. 
 Poor Tetty, whatever were our faults and failings, we loved 
 each other. I did not forget thee yesterday. Couldst thou 
 have lived ! I am now, with the help of God, to begin a new life. 
 
 Dr. Hill prints an interesting letter of Mr. 
 
 Jowett's, in which occur the following observations: 
 
 It is a curious question whether Boswell has unconsciously 
 misrepresented Johnson in any respect. I think, judging 
 from the materials, which are supplied chiefly by himself, 
 that in one respect he has. He has represented him more as 
 a sage and philosopher in his conduct as well as his conver- 
 sation than he really was, and less as a rollicking " King of 
 Society." The gravity of Johnson's own writings tends to 
 confirm this, as I suspect, erroneous impression. His religion 
 was fitful and intermittent ; and when once the ice was broken 
 he enjoyed Jack Wilkes, though he refused to shake hands 
 with Hume. I was much struck with a remark of Sir John 
 Hawkins (excuse me if I have mentioned this to you before): 
 " He was the most humorous man I ever knew." 
 
 Mr. Jowett's letter raises some nice pointS' — the 
 Wilkes and Hume point, for example. Dr. Johnson 
 hated both blasphemy and bawd, but he hated 
 blasphemy most. Mr. Jowett shared the doctor's 
 antipathies, but very likely hated bawd more than 
 he did blasphemy. But, as I have already said, 
 the point is a nice one. To crack jokes with Wilkes 
 at the expense of Boswell and the Scotch seems to 
 me a very different thing from shaking hands with 
 Hume. But, indeed, it is absurd to overlook either 
 Johnson's melancholy piety or his abounding
 
 THE JOHNSONIAN LEGEND 149 
 
 humour and love of fun and nonsense. His Prayers 
 and Meditations are full of the one, Boswell and 
 Mrs. Thrale and Madame D'Arblay are full of the 
 other. Boswell's 'Johnson has superseded the 
 " authorised biography " by Sir John Hawkins, 
 and Dr. Hill did well to include in these Miscellanies 
 Hawkins' inimitable description of the memorable 
 banquet given at the Devil Tavern, near Temple 
 Bar, in the spring of 1751, to celebrate the publi- 
 cation of Mrs. Charlotte Lennox's first novel. What 
 dehghtful revelry! what innocent mirth! pro- 
 longed though it was till long after dawn. Mrs. 
 Lennox died in distress in 1804, at the age of 
 eighty-three. Could Johnson but have lived he 
 would have lent her his helping hand. He was no 
 fair-weather friend, but shares with Charles Lamb 
 the honour of being able to unite narrow means 
 and splendid munificence. 
 
 I must end with an anecdote : 
 
 " Henderson asked the doctor's opinion of Dido 
 and its author. ' Sir,' said Dr. Johnson, ' I never 
 did the man an injury. Yet he would read his 
 tragedy to mc.' "
 
 BOSWELL AS BIOGRAPHER 
 1906 
 
 BOSWELL'S position in English literature 
 cannot be disputed, nor can he ever be 
 displaced from it. He has written our 
 greatest biography. That is all. Theorise about 
 it as much as you like, account for it how you 
 may, the fact remains. " Alone I did it." There 
 has been plenty of theorising. Lord Macaulay 
 took the subject in hand and tossed it up and 
 down for half a dozen pages with a gusto that 
 drove home to many minds the conviction, the 
 strange conviction, that our greatest biography 
 was written by one of the very smallest men that 
 ever lived, " a man of the meanest and feeblest 
 intellect " — by a dunce, a parasite, and a cox- 
 comb; by one "who, if he had not been a great 
 fool, would never have been a great writer." So 
 far Macaulay, anno Domini 1831, in the vigorous 
 pages of the Edinburgh Review. A year later 
 appears in Fraser's Magazine another theory by 
 another hand, not then famous, Mr. Thomas 
 Carlyle. I own to an inordinate affection for Mr. 
 Carlyle as " literary critic." As philosopher and 
 sage, he has served our turn. We have had the 
 fortune, good or bad, to outlive him; and our sad 
 experience is that death makes a mighty difference 
 to all but the very greatest. The sight of the 
 author of Sartor Resartus in a Chelsea omnibus, 
 
 150
 
 BOSWELL AS BIOGRAPHER 151 
 
 the sound of Dr. Newman's voice preaching to a 
 small congregation in Birmingham, kept alive in 
 our minds the vision of their greatness — it seemed 
 then as if that greatness could know no limit; 
 but no sooner had they gone away, than somehow 
 or another one became conscious of some defi- 
 ciency in their intellectual positions — the tide of 
 human thought rushed visibly by them, and it 
 became plain that to no other generation would 
 either of these men be what they had been to 
 their own. But Mr. Carlyle as literary critic has 
 a tenacious grasp, and Boswell was a subject made 
 for his hand. " Your Scottish laird, says an Eng- 
 lish naturalist of those days, may be defined as 
 the hungriest and vainest of all bipeds yet known." 
 Carlyle knew the type well enough. His general 
 description of Boswell is savage : 
 
 Boswell was a person whose mean or bad qualities lay open 
 to the general eye, visible, palpable to the dullest. His good 
 qualities, again, belonged not to the time he lived in; were 
 far from common then; indeed, in such a degree were almost 
 unexampled; not recognisable, therefore, by everyone; 
 nay, apt even, so strange had they grown, to be confounded 
 with the very vices they lay contiguous to and had sprung 
 out of. That he was a wine-bibber and good liver, gluttonously 
 fond of whatever would yield him a little solacement, were 
 it only of a stomachic character, is undeniable enough. That 
 he was vain, heedless, a babbler, had much of the sycophant, 
 alternating with the braggadocio, curiously spiced, too, with 
 an all-pervading dash of the coxcomb; that he gloried much 
 when the tailor by a court suit had made a new man of him; 
 that he appeared at the Shakespeare Jubilee with a riband 
 imprinted "Corsica Boswell" round his hat, and, in short, 
 if you will, lived no day of his life without saying and doing 
 more than one pretentious ineptitude, all this unhappily is 
 evident as the sun at noon. The very look of Boswell seems 
 to have signified so much. In that cocked nose, cocked partly 
 in triumph over his weaker fellow-creatures, partly to snuff 
 up the smell of coming pleasure and scent it from afar, in 
 those big cheeks, hanging like half-filled wine-skins, still
 
 152 BOSWELL AS BIOGRAPHER 
 
 able to contain more, in that coarsely-protruded shelf mouth, 
 that fat dew-lapped chin; in all this who sees not sensuality, 
 pretension, boisterous imbecility enough ? The underpart of 
 Boswell's face is of a low, almost brutish character. 
 
 This is character-painting with a vengeance. 
 Portrait of a Scotch laird by the son of a Scotch 
 peasant. Carlyle's Boswell is to me the very man. 
 If, so, Carlyle's paradox seems as great as Macau- 
 lay's, for though Carlyle does not call Boswell a 
 great fool in plain set terms, he goes very near it. 
 But he keeps open a door through which he effects 
 his escape. Carlyle sees in Bozzy " the old reverent 
 feeling of discipleship, in a word, hero-worship." 
 
 How the babbling Bozzy, inspired only by love and the 
 recognition and vision which love can lend, epitomises nightly 
 the words of Wisdom, the deeds and aspects of Wisdom, and 
 so, little by little, unconsciously works together for us a whole 
 " Johnsoniad " — a more free, perfect, sunlit and spirit- 
 speaking likeness than for many centuries has been drawn 
 by man of man. 
 
 This I think is a little overdrawn. That Boswell 
 loved Johnson, God forbid I should deny. But that 
 he was inspired only by love to write his life, I 
 gravely question. Boswell was, as Carlyle has 
 said, a greedy man — and especially was he greedy 
 of fame — and he saw in his revered friend a splendid 
 subject for artistic biographic treatment. Here is 
 where both Macaulay and Carlyle are, as I suggest, 
 wrong. Boswell was a fool, but only in the sense 
 in which hundreds of great artists have been fools; 
 on his own lines, and across his own bit of country, 
 he was no fool. He did not accidentally stumble 
 across success, but he deliberately aimed at what 
 he hit. Read his Preface and you will discover his 
 method. He was as much an artist as either of his 
 two famous critics. Where Carlyle goes astray is
 
 BOSWELL AS BIOGRAPHER 153 
 
 in attributing to disciplcship what was mainly due 
 to a dramatic sense. However, theories are no 
 great matter. 
 
 Our means of knowledge of James Boswell are 
 derived mainly from himself; he is his own in- 
 criminator. In addition to the Life there is the 
 Corsican Tour, the Hebrides Tour, the letters to 
 Erskine and to Temple, and a few insignificant 
 occasional publications in the shape of letters to 
 the people of Scotland, etc. With these before 
 him it is impossible for any biographer to approach 
 Bozzy in a devotional attitude; he was all Carlyle 
 calls him. Our sympathies are with his father, who 
 despised him, and with his son, who was ashamed 
 of him. It is indeed strange to think of him stag- 
 gering, like the drunkard he was, between these 
 two respectable and even stately figures — the 
 Senator of the Court of Justice and the courtly 
 scholar and antiquary. And yet it is to the 
 drunkard humanity is debtor. Respectability is 
 not everything. 
 
 Boswell had many literary projects and ambi- 
 tions, and never intended to be known merely as 
 the biographer of Johnson. He proposed to write 
 a life of Lord Kaimes and to compose memoirs of 
 Hume. It seems he did write a life of Sir Robert 
 Sibbald. He had other plans in his head, but 
 dissipation and a steadily increasing drunkenness 
 destroyed them all. As inveterate book-hunter, I 
 confess to a great fancy to lay hands on his Dorando: 
 A Spanish Tale, a shilling book published in Edin- 
 burgh during the progress of the once famous 
 Douglas case, and ordered to be suppressed as 
 contempt of court after it had been through three
 
 154 BOSWELL AS BIOGRAPHER 
 
 editions. It is said, probably hastily, that no copy 
 is known to exist — a dreary fate which, according 
 to Lord Macaulay, might have attended upon the 
 Life of Johnson had the copyright of that work 
 become the property of Boswell's son, who hated 
 to hear it mentioned. It is not, however, very 
 easy to get rid of any book once it is pub- 
 lished, and I do not despair of reading Dorando 
 before I die. 
 
 Note. — The late George Inglis, of the Hope 
 Trust, Edinburgh, was good enough, after reading 
 this passage, to send me a type-written copy of 
 Dorando, which he made for me from a copy 
 of the original in the Library of the University 
 of Edinburgh. So now I have read Dorando. 
 
 J
 
 EDMUND BURKE 
 
 A LECTURE DELIVERED BEFORE THE EDINBURGH 
 PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY 
 
 1887 
 
 MR. JOHN MORLEY, who amongst other 
 things has written two admirable books 
 about Edmund Burke, is to be found in 
 the Preface to the second of them apologising for 
 having introduced into the body of the work 
 extracts from his former volume — conduct which 
 he seeks to justify by quoting from the Greek 
 (always a desirable thing to do when in a difficulty), 
 to prove that, though you may say what you have 
 to say well once, you cannot so say it twice. 
 
 A difficulty somewhat of the same kind cannot 
 fail to be felt by every one who takes upon himself 
 to write on Burke; for however innocent a man's 
 own past life may be of any public references to 
 the subject, the very many good things other men 
 have said about it must seriously interfere with 
 true liberty of treatment. 
 
 Hardly any man, and certainly no politician, 
 has been so bepraised as Burke, whose very name, 
 suggesting, as it does, splendour of diction, has 
 tempted those who would praise him to do so in 
 a highly decorated style, and it would have been 
 easy work to have brought together a sufficient 
 number of animated passages from the works of 
 
 155
 
 156 EDMUND BURKE 
 
 well-known writers all dedicated to the greater 
 glory of Edmund Burke, and then to have tagged 
 on half-a-dozen specimens of his own resplendent 
 rhetoric, and so to have come to an apparently 
 natural and long-desired conclusion without ex- 
 citing any more than the usual post-lectorial 
 grumble. 
 
 This course, however, not recommending itself, 
 some other method had to be discovered. Happily, 
 it is out of the question within present limits to 
 give any proper summary of Burke's public life. 
 This great man was not, like some modern politi- 
 cians, a specialist, confining his activities within 
 the prospectus of an association; nor was he, like 
 some others, a thing of shreds and patches, busily 
 employed to-day picking up the facts with which 
 he will overwhelm his opponents on the morrow; 
 but was one ever ready to engage with all comers 
 on all subjects from out the stores of his accumu- 
 lated knowledge. Even were we to confine ourselves 
 to those questions only which engaged Burke's 
 most powerful attention, enlisted his most active 
 sympathy, elicited his most bewitching rhetoric, 
 we should still find ourselves called upon to grapple 
 with problems as vast and varied as Economic 
 Reform, the Status of our Colonies, our Empire 
 in India, our relations with Ireland both in respect 
 to her trade and her prevalent religion; and then, 
 blurring the picture, as some may think — certainly 
 rendering it Titianesque and gloomy — we have the 
 spectacle of Burke in his old age, like another 
 Laocoon, writhing and wrestling with the French 
 Revolution; and it may serve to give us some dim 
 notion of how great a man Burke was, of how
 
 EDMUND BURKE 157 
 
 affluent a mind, of how potent an Imagination, of 
 how resistless an energy, that even when his sole 
 unassisted name is pitted against the outcome of 
 centuries, and we say Burke and the French 
 Revolution, we are not overwhelmed by any sense 
 of obvious absurdity or incongruity. 
 
 What I propose to do is merely to consider a 
 little Burke's life prior to his obtaining a seat in 
 Parliament, and then to refer to any circumstances 
 which may help us to account for the fact that 
 this truly extraordinary man, whose intellectual 
 resources beggar the imagination, and who devoted 
 himself to politics with all the forces of his nature, 
 never so much as attained to a seat in the Cabinet 
 — a. feat one has known to be accomplished by 
 persons of no proved intellectual agility. Having 
 done this, I shall then, bearing in mind the aphor- 
 ism of Lord Beaconsfield, that it is always better 
 to be impudent than servile, essay an analysis of 
 the essential elements of Burke's character. 
 
 The first great fact to remember is, that the 
 Edmund Burke we are all agreed in regarding as 
 one of the proudest memories of the House of 
 Commons was an Irishman. When we are in our 
 next fit of political depression about that island, 
 and are about piously to wish, as the poet Spenser 
 tells us men were wishing even in his time, that it 
 were not adjacent, let us do a little national stock- 
 taking, and calculate profits as well as losses. 
 Burke was not only an Irishman, but a typical 
 one — of the very kind many EngHshmen, and even 
 possibly some Scotchmen, make a point of disliking. 
 I do not say he was an aboriginal Irishman, but 
 his ancestors are said to have settled in the county
 
 158 EDMUND BURKE 
 
 of Galway, under Strongbow, in King Henry the 
 Second's time, when Ireland was first conquered 
 and our troubles began. This, at all events, is a 
 better Irish pedigree than Mr. Parnell's. 
 
 Skipping six centuries, we find Burke's father 
 an attorney in Dublin — which somehow sounds a 
 very Irish thing to be — who in 1725 married a 
 Miss Nagle, and had fifteen children. The marriage 
 of Burke's parents was of the kind called mixed — 
 a term which doubtless admits of wide application, 
 but when employed technically signifies that the 
 religious faith of the spouses was different; one, 
 the father, being a Protestant, and the lady an 
 adherent to what used to be pleasantly called the 
 " old religion." The severer spirit now dominating 
 Catholic councils has condemned these marriages, 
 on the score of their bad theology and their lax 
 morality; but the practical politician, who is not 
 usually much of a theologian — though Lord Mel- 
 bourne and Mr. Gladstone are distinguished excep- 
 tions' — and whose moral conscience is apt to be 
 robust (and here I believe there are no exceptions), 
 cannot but regret that so good an opportunity of 
 lubricating religious differences with the sweet oil 
 of the domestic affections should be lost to us 
 in these days of bitterness and dissension. Burke 
 was brought up in the Protestant faith of his 
 father, and was never in any real danger of devi- 
 ating from it; but I cannot doubt that his regard 
 for his Catholic fellow-subjects, his fierce repudia- 
 tion of the infamies of the Penal Code — ^whose 
 horrors he did something to mitigate — his respect 
 for antiquity, and his historic sense, were all 
 quickened by the fact that a tenderly loved and
 
 EDMUND BURKE 159 
 
 loving mother belonged through life and in death 
 to an ancient and an outraged faith. 
 
 The great majority of Burke's brothers and 
 sisters, like those of Laurence Sterne, were " not 
 made to live "; and out of the fifteen but three, 
 beside himself, attained maturity. These were his 
 eldest brother, Garrett, on whose death Edmund 
 succeeded to the patrimonial Irish estate, which 
 he sold; his younger brother, Richard, a highly 
 speculative gentleman, who always lost; and his 
 sister, Juliana, who married a Mr. French, and 
 was, as became her mother's daughter, a rigid 
 Roman Catholic — ^who, so we read, was accus- 
 tomed every Christmas Day to invite to the Hall 
 the maimed, the aged, and distressed of her vicinity 
 to a plentiful repast, during which she waited 
 upon them as a servant. A sister like this never 
 did any man any serious harm. 
 
 Edmund Burke was born in 1729, in Dublin, and 
 was taught his rudiments in the country — ^first by 
 a Mr. O'Halloran, and afterwards by a Mr. Fitz- 
 Gerald, village pedagogues both, who at all events 
 succeeded in giving their charge a brogue which 
 death alone could silence. Burke passed from 
 their hands to an academy at Ballitore, kept by 
 a Quaker, from whence he proceeded to Trinity 
 College, Dublin. He was thus not only Irish born, 
 but Irish bred. His intellectual habit of mind 
 exhibited itself early. He belonged to the happy 
 family of omnivorous readers, and, in the language 
 of his latest schoolmaster, he went to college with 
 a larger miscellaneous stock of reading than was 
 usual with one of his years; which, being inter- 
 preted out of pedagogic into plain English, means
 
 i6o EDMUND BURKE 
 
 that " our good Edmund " was an enormous de- 
 vourer of poetry and novels, and so he remained 
 to the end of his days. That he always preferred 
 Fielding to Richardson is satisfactory, since it 
 pairs him off nicely with Dr. Johnson, whose 
 preference was the other way, and so helps to 
 keep an interesting question wide open. His 
 passion for the poetry of Virgil is significant. His 
 early devotion to Edward Young, the grandiose 
 author of the Night Thoughts^ is not to be wondered 
 at; though the inspiration of the youthful Burke, 
 either as poet or critic, may be questioned, when 
 we find him rapturously scribbling in the margin 
 of his copy : 
 
 Jove claimed the verse old Homer sung, 
 But God Himself inspired Dr. Young. 
 
 But a boy's enthusiasm for a favourite poet is 
 a thing to rejoice over. The years that bring 
 the philosophic mind will not bring — they must 
 find — enthusiasm. 
 
 In 1750, Burke (being then twenty-one) came 
 for the first time to London, to do what so many 
 of his lively young countrymen are still doing — 
 though they are beginning to make a grievance 
 even of that — eat his dinners at the Middle Temple, 
 and so qualify himself for the Bar. Certainly that 
 student was in luck who found himself in the same 
 mess with Burke; and yet so stupid are men — so 
 prone to rest with their full weight on the im- 
 material and slide over the essential — that had 
 that good fortune been ours we should probably 
 have been more taken up with Burke's brogue 
 than with his brains. Burke came to London with 
 a cultivated curiosity, and in no spirit of desperate
 
 EDMUND BURKE i6i 
 
 determination to make his fortune. That the study 
 of the law interested him cannot be doubted, for 
 everything interested him, particularly the stage. 
 Like the sensible Irishman he was, he lost his 
 heart to Peg Wofhngton on the first opportunity. 
 He was fond of roaming about the country, during, 
 it is to be hoped, vacation-time only, and is to be 
 found writing the most cheerful letters to his 
 friends in Ireland (all of whom are persuaded that 
 he is going some day to be somebody, though 
 sorely puzzled to surmise what thing or when, so 
 pleasantly does he take life), from all sorts of out- 
 of-the-way country places, where he lodges with 
 quaint old landladies who wonder maternally why 
 he never gets drunk, and generally mistake him 
 for an author until he pays his bill. When in town 
 he frequented debating societies in Fleet Street 
 and Covent Garden, and made his first speeches; 
 for which purpose he would, unlike some debaters, 
 devote studious hours to getting up the subjects 
 to be discussed. There is good reason to believe 
 that it was in this manner his attention was first 
 directed to India. He was at all times a great 
 talker, and, Dr. Johnson's dictum notwithstanding, 
 a good listener. He was endlessly interested in 
 everything — in the state of the crops, in the last 
 play, in the details of all trades, the rhythm of all 
 poems, the plots of all novels, and indeed in the 
 course of every manufacture. And so for six years 
 he went up and down, to and fro, gathering in- 
 formation, imparting knowledge, and preparing 
 himself, though he knew not for what. 
 
 The attorney in Dubhn grew anxious, and 
 searched for precedents of a son behaving like 
 
 I L
 
 i62 EDMUND BURKE 
 
 his, and rising to eminence. Had his son got the 
 legal mind ? — which, according to a keen observer, 
 chiefly displays itself by illustrating the obvious, 
 explaining the evident, and expatiating on the 
 commonplace. Edmund's powers of illustration, 
 explanation, and expatiation could not indeed be 
 questioned; but then the subjects selected for the 
 exhibition of those powers were very far indeed 
 from being obvious, evident, or commonplace; and 
 the attorney's heart grew heavy within him. The 
 paternal displeasure was signified in the usual 
 manner — the supplies were cut off. Edmund 
 Burke, however, was no ordinary prodigal, and 
 his reply to his father's expostulations took the 
 unexpected and unprecedented shape of a copy 
 of a second and enlarged edition of his treatise 
 on the Sublime and Beautiful, which he had pub- 
 lished in 1756 at the price of three shillings. Burke's 
 father promptly sent the author a bank-bill for 
 ^100 — conduct on his part which, considering he 
 had sent his son to London and maintained him 
 there for six years to study law, was, in my judg- 
 ment, both sublime and beautiful. In the same 
 year Burke published another pamphlet — a one- 
 and-sixpenny affair — written ironically, in the style 
 of Lord BoHngbroke, and called A Vindication oj 
 Natural Society ; or a View of the Miseries and 
 Evils arising to Mankind from Every S'pecies of 
 Civil Society. Irony is a dangerous weapon for a 
 public man to have ever employed, and in after- 
 life Burke had frequently to explain that he was 
 not serious. On these two pamphlets' airy pinions 
 Burke floated into the harbour of literary fame. 
 No less a man than the great David Hume referred
 
 EDMUND BURKE 163 
 
 to him, in a letter to the hardly less great Adam 
 Smith, as an Irish gentleman who had written a 
 " very pretty treatise on the Sublime." After 
 these efforts, Burke, as became an established wit, 
 went to Bath to recruit, and there, fitly enough, 
 fell in love. The lady was Miss Jane Mary Nugent, 
 the daughter of a celebrated Bath physician; and 
 it is pleasant to be able to say of the marriage that 
 was shortly solemnised between the young couple, 
 that it was a happy one, and then to go on our way, 
 leaving them — where man and wife ought to be 
 left' — alone. Oddly enough, Burke's wife was also 
 the offspring of a " mixed marriage " — only in her 
 case it was the father who was the Catholic; conse- 
 quently both Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Burke were of 
 the same way of thinking, but each had a parent 
 of the other way. Although getting married is no 
 part of the curriculum of a law student, Burke's 
 father seems to have come to the conclusion that 
 after all it was a greater distinction for an attorney 
 in Dublin to have a son living amongst the wits in 
 London, and discoursing familiarly on the " Sub- 
 lime and Beautiful," than one prosecuting some 
 poor countryman, with a brogue as rich as his own, 
 for stealing a pair of breeches; for we find him 
 generously allowing the young couple 3^200 a year, 
 which no doubt went some way towards maintain- 
 ing them. Burke, who was now in his twenty-eighth 
 year, seems to have given up all notion of the law. 
 In 1758 he wrote for Dodsley the first volume of 
 the Annual Register, a melancholy series which 
 continues to this day. For doing this he got j^ioo. 
 Burke was by this time a well-known figure in 
 London literary society, and was busy making for
 
 i64 EDMUND BURKE 
 
 himself a huge private reputation. The Christmas 
 Day of 1758 witnessed a singular scene at the 
 dinner table of David Garrick. Dr. Johnson, then 
 in the full vigour of his mind, and with the all- 
 dreaded weapons of his dialectics kept burnished 
 by daily use, was flatly contradicted by a fellow- 
 guest some twenty years his junior, and, what is 
 more, submitted to it without a murmur. One of 
 the diners, Arthur Murphy, was so struck by this 
 occurrence, unique in his long experience of the 
 Doctor, that on returning home he recorded the 
 fact in his journal, but ventured no explanation of 
 it. It can only be accounted for — so at least I 
 venture to think — by the combined effect of four 
 wholly independent circumstances: Firsts the day 
 was Christmas Day, a day of peace and goodwill, 
 and our beloved Doctor was amongst the sincerest, 
 though most argumentative of Christians, and a 
 great observer of days. Second, the house was 
 David Garrick's, and consequently we may be 
 certain that the dinner had been a superlatively 
 good one; and has not Boswell placed on record 
 Johnson's opinion of the man who professed to 
 be indifferent about his dinner ? Third, the subject 
 under discussion was India, about which Johnson 
 knew he knew next to nothing. And fourth, the 
 offender was Edmund Burke, whom Johnson loved 
 from the first day he set eyes upon him to their 
 last sad parting by the waters of death. 
 
 In 1 76 1 that shrewd old gossip, Horace Walpole, 
 met Burke for the first time at dinner, and remarks 
 of him in a letter to George Montague : 
 
 I dined at Hamilton's yesterday; there were Garrick, and 
 young Mr. Burke, who wrote a book in the style of Lord
 
 EDMUND BURKE 165 
 
 Bolingbroke, that was much admired. He is a sensible man, 
 but has not worn off his authorism yet, and thinks there is 
 nothing so charming as writers, and to be one. He will know 
 better one of these days. 
 
 But great as were Burke's literary powers, and 
 passionate as was his fondness for letters and for 
 literary society, he never seems to have felt that 
 the main burden of his life lay in that direction. 
 He looked to the pubhc service, and this though 
 he always believed that the pen of a great writer 
 was a more powerful and glorious weapon than 
 any to be found in the armoury of politics. This 
 faith of his comes out sometimes queerly enough. 
 For example, when Dr. Robertson in 1777 sent 
 Burke his cheerful History oj America in quarto 
 volumes, Burke, in the most perfect good faith, 
 closes a long letter of thanks thus : 
 
 You will smile when I send you a trifling temporary pro- 
 duction made for the occasion of the day, and to perish with 
 it, in return for your immortal work. 
 
 I have no desire, least of all in Edinburgh, to 
 say anything disrespectful of Principal Robertson; 
 but still, when we remember that the temporary 
 production he got in exchange for his History oj 
 America was Burke's immortal letter to the Sheriffs 
 of Bristol on the American War, we must, I think, 
 be forced to admit that, as so often happens when 
 a Scotchman and an Irishman do business together, 
 the former got the better of the bargain. 
 
 Burke's first public employment was of a humble 
 character, and might well have been passed over 
 in a sentence, had it not terminated in a most 
 delightful quarrel, in which Burke conducted him- 
 self like an Irishman of genius. Some time in 
 1759 he became acquainted with William Gerard
 
 i66 EDMUND BURKE 
 
 Hamilton, commonly called " Single-speech Hamil- 
 ton," on account of the celebrity he gained from 
 his first speech in Parliament, and the steady way 
 in which his oratorical reputation went on waning 
 ever after. In 1 761 this gentleman went over to 
 Ireland as Chief Secretary, and Burke accom- 
 panied him as the Secretary's secretary, or, in 
 the unlicensed speech of Dublin, as Hamilton's 
 jackal. This arrangement was eminently satis- 
 factory to Hamilton, who found, as generations 
 of men have found after him, Burke's brains very 
 useful, and he determined to borrow them for the 
 period of their joint lives. Animated by this 
 desire, in itself praiseworthy, he busied himself in 
 procuring for Burke a pension of ;^300 a year on 
 the Irish establishment, and then the simple 
 " Single-speech " thought the transaction closed. 
 He had bought his poor man of genius, and paid 
 for him on the nail with other people's money. 
 Nothing remained but for Burke to draw his 
 pension and devote the rest of his life to main- 
 taining Hamilton's reputation. There is nothing 
 at all unusual in this, and I have no doubt Burke 
 would have stuck to his bargain, had not Hamilton 
 conceived the fatal idea that Burke's brains were 
 exclusively his (Hamilton's). Then the situation 
 became one of risk and apparent danger. 
 
 Burke's imagination began playing round the 
 subject: he saw himself a slave, blotted out of 
 existence — mere fuel for Hamilton's flame. In a 
 week he was in a towering passion. Few men can 
 afford to be angry. It is a run upon their intel- 
 lectual resources they cannot meet. But Burke's 
 treasury could well afford the luxury; and his
 
 EDMUND BURKE 167 
 
 letters to Hamilton make delightful reading to 
 those who, like myself, dearly love a dispute when 
 conducted according to the rules of the game by 
 men of great intellectual wealth. Hamilton demo- 
 hshed and reduced to stony silence, Burke sat 
 down again and wrote long letters to all his friends, 
 telling them the whole story from beginning to 
 end. I must be allowed a quotation from one of 
 these letters, for this really is not so frivolous a 
 matter as I am afraid I have made it appear^ — 
 a quotation of which this much may be said, 
 that nothing more delightfully Burkean is to be 
 found anywhere: 
 
 My dear Mason, 
 
 I am hardly able to tell you how much satisfaction I had 
 in your letter. Your approbation of my conduct makes me 
 beheve much the better of you and myself; and I assure 
 you that that approbation came to me very seasonably. Such 
 proofs of a warm, sincere, and disinterested friendship were 
 not whoUj^ unnecessary to my support at a time when I ex- 
 perienced such bitter effects of the perfidy and ingratitude 
 of much longer and much closer connections. The way in 
 which you take up my affairs binds me to you in a manner 
 I cannot express; for to tell you the truth, I never can 
 (knowing as I do the principles upon which I always endeavour 
 to act) submit to any sort of compromise of my character; 
 and I shall never, therefore, look upon those who, after 
 hearing the whole story, do not think me perfectly in the 
 right, and do not consider Hamilton an infamous scoundrel, 
 to be in the smallest degree my friends, or even to be persons 
 for whom I am bound to have the slightest esteem, as fair 
 and just estimators of the characters and conduct of men. 
 Situated as I am, and feehng as I do, I should be just as well 
 pleased that they totally condemned me, as that they should 
 say there were faults on both sides, or that it was a disputable 
 case, as I hear is (I cannot forbear saying) the affected language 
 of some persons. . . . You cannot avoid remarking, my dear 
 Mason, and I hope not without some indignation, the un- 
 paralleled singularity of my situation. Was ever a man before 
 me expected to enter into formal, direct, and undisguised 
 slavery? Did ever man before him confess an attempt to 
 decoy a man into such an alleged contract, not to say anything
 
 i68 EDMUND BURKE 
 
 of the impudence of regularly pleading it ? If such an attempt 
 be wicked and unlawful (and I am sure no one ever doubted 
 it), I have only to confess his charge, and to admit myself 
 his dupe, to make him pass, on his own showing, for the most 
 consummate villain that ever lived. The only difference be- 
 tween us is, not whether he is not a rogue — for he not only 
 admits but pleads the facts that demonstrate him to be so; 
 but only whether I was such a fool as to sell myself absolutely 
 for a consideration which, so far from being adequate, if any 
 such could be adequate, is not even so much as certain. Not 
 to value myself as a gentleman, a free man, a man of education, 
 and one pretending to literature; is there any situation in 
 life so low, or even so criminal, that can subject a man to the 
 possibility of such an engagement ? Would you dare attempt 
 to bind your footman to such terms ? Will the law suffer a 
 felon sent to the plantations to bind himself for his life, and 
 to renounce all possibility either of elevation or quiet ? And 
 am I to defend myself for not doing what no man is suffered 
 to do, and what it would be criminal in any man to submit 
 to ? You will excuse me for this heat. 
 
 I not only excuse Burke for his heat, but love 
 him for letting me warm my hands at it after a 
 lapse of a hundred and twenty years. 
 
 Burke was more fortunate in his second master, 
 for in 1765, being then thirty-six years of age, he 
 became private secretary to the new Prime Minister, 
 the Marquis of Rockingham; was by the interest 
 of Lord Verney returned to Parliament for Wend- 
 over, in Bucks ; and on January 27th, 1766, his 
 voice was first heard in the House of Commons. 
 
 The Rockingham Ministry deserves well of the 
 historian, and on the whole has received its deserts. 
 Lord Rockingham, the Duke of Richmond, Lord 
 John Cavendish, Mr. Dowdeswell, and the rest of 
 them, were good men and true, judged by an 
 ordinary standard; and when contrasted with most 
 of their political competitors, they almost approach 
 the ranks of saints and angels. However, after a 
 year and twenty days, his Majesty King George
 
 EDMUND BURKE 169 
 
 the Third managed to get rid of them, and to keep 
 them at bay for fifteen years. But their first term 
 of office, though short, lasted long enough to 
 establish a friendship of no ordinary powers of 
 endurance between the chief members of the party 
 and the Prime Minister's private secretary, who 
 was at first, so ran the report, supposed to be a 
 wild Irishman, whose real name was O'Bourke, 
 and whose brogue seemed to require the allegation 
 that its owner was a popish emissary. It is satis- 
 factory to notice how from the very first Burke's 
 intellectual pre-eminence, character, and aims were 
 clearly admitted and most cheerfully recognised by 
 his political and social superiors; and in the long 
 correspondence in which he engaged with most of 
 them, there is not a trace to be found, on one 
 side or the other, of anything approaching to 
 either patronage or servility. Burke advises them, 
 exhorts them, expostulates with them, condemns 
 their aristocratic languor, fans their feeble flames, 
 drafts their motions, dictates their protests, visits 
 their houses, and generally supplies them with 
 facts, figures, poetry, and romance. To all this 
 they submit with much humility. The Duke of 
 Richmond once indeed ventured to hint to Burke, 
 with exceeding delicacy, that he (the Duke) had 
 a small private estate to attend to as well as public 
 affairs; but the vahdity of the excuse was not 
 admitted. The part Burke played for the next 
 fifteen years with relation to the Rockingham party 
 reminds me of the functions I have observed per- 
 formed in lazy famihes by a soberly clad and 
 eminently respectable person who pays them domi- 
 ciliary visits, and, having admission everywhere.
 
 I70 EDMUND BURKE 
 
 goes about mysteriously from room to room, 
 winding up all the clocks. This is what Burke 
 did for the Rockingham party — he kept it going. 
 But fortunately for us, Burke was not content 
 with private adjuration, or even public speech. His 
 literary instincts, his dominating desire to persuade 
 everybody that he, Edmund Burke, was absolutely 
 in the right, and every one of his opponents hope- 
 lessly wrong, made him turn to the pamphlet as a 
 propaganda, and in his hands 
 
 The thing became a trumpet, whence he blew 
 Soul-animating strains. 
 
 So accustomed are we to regard Burke's pamphlets 
 as specimens of our noblest literature, and to see 
 them printed in comfortable volumes, that we are 
 apt to forget that in their origin they were but the 
 children of the pavement, the publications of the 
 hour. If, however, you ever visit any old public 
 library, and grope about a little, you are likely 
 enough to find a shelf holding some twenty-five 
 or thirty musty, ugly little books, usually lettered 
 " Burke," and on opening any of them you will 
 come across one of Burke's pamphlets as originally 
 issued, bound up with the repHes and counter- 
 pamphlets it occasioned. I have frequently tried, 
 but always in vain, to read these replies, which 
 are pretentious enough — usually the works of 
 deans, members of Parliament, and other dig- 
 nitaries of the class Carlyle used compendiously 
 to describe as " shovel-hatted " — and each of 
 whom was as much entitled to publish pamphlets 
 as Burke himself. There are some things it is very 
 easy to do, and to write a pamphlet is one of them; 
 but to write such a pamphlet as future generations
 
 EDMUND BURKE 171 
 
 will read with delight is perhaps the most difficult 
 feat in literature. Milton, Swift, Burke, and Sydney 
 Smith are, I think, our only great pamphleteers. 
 
 I have now rather more than kept my word so 
 far as Burke's pre-parliamentary life is concerned, 
 and will proceed to mention some of the circum- 
 stances that may serve to account for the fact 
 that when the Rockingham party came into power 
 for the second time in 1782, Burke, who was their 
 life and soul, was only rewarded with a minor 
 office. First, then, it must be recorded sorrowfully 
 of Burke that he was always desperately in debt, 
 and in this country no politician under the rank 
 of a baronet can ever safely be in debt. Burke's 
 finances are, and always have been, marvels and 
 mysteries; but one thing must be said of them 
 that the malignity of his enemies, both Tory 
 enemies and Radical enemies, has never succeeded 
 in formulating any charge of dishonesty against 
 him that has not been at once completely pul- 
 verised, and shown on the facts to be impossible.^ 
 Burke's purchase of the estate at Beaconsfield in 
 1768, only two years after he entered Parliament, 
 consisting as it did of a good house and 1600 acres 
 of land, has puzzled a great many good men — much 
 more than it ever did Edmund Burke. But how 
 
 * All the difficulties connected with this subject will be found 
 collected, and somewhat unkindly considered, in Mr. Dilke's Papers 
 of a Critic, vol. ii. The equity draftsman will be indisposed to 
 attach importance to statements made in a Bill of Complaint filed 
 in Chancery by Lord Verney against Burke fourteen years after 
 the transaction to which it had reference, in a suit which was 
 abandoned after answer put in. But it should be remembered 
 that in those days a party to Chancery proceedings could not be 
 cross-examined, and Burke having by his sworn Answer denied the 
 statements in the Bill of Complaint, Lord Verney had no other 
 course open than to drop the case, unless he had thought fit to 
 amend the original Bill and begin again.
 
 172 EDMUND BURKE 
 
 did he get the money ? After an Irish fashion — by 
 not getting it at all. Two-thirds of the purchase- 
 money remained on mortgage, and the balance he 
 borrowed; or, as he puts it, "With all I could 
 collect of my own, and by the aid of my friends, 
 I have established a root in the country." That is 
 how Burke bought Beaconsfield, where he lived till 
 his end came; whither he always hastened when 
 his sensitive mind was tortured by the thought of 
 how badly men governed the world; where he 
 entertained all sorts and conditions of men — 
 Quakers, Brahmins (for whose ancient rites he 
 provided suitable accommodation in a green- 
 house), nobles and abbes flying from revolu- 
 tionary France, poets, painters, and peers; no 
 one of whom ever long remained a stranger to 
 his charm. Burke flung himself into farming with 
 all the enthusiasm of his nature. His letters to 
 Arthur Young on the subject of carrots still tremble 
 with emotion. You all know Burke's Thoughts on 
 the Present Discontents. You remember — it is hard 
 to forget — his speech on Conciliation with America, 
 particularly the magnificent passage beginning, 
 " Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest 
 wisdom, and a great empire and little minds go ill 
 together." You have echoed back the words in 
 which, in his letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol on 
 the hateful American War, he protests that it was 
 not instantly he could be brought to rejoice when 
 he heard of the slaughter and captivity of long lists 
 of those whose names had been familiar in his ears 
 from his infancy, and you would all join with me 
 in subscribing to a fund which should have for its 
 object the printing and hanging up over every
 
 EDMUND BURKE 173 
 
 editor's desk in town and country a subsequent 
 passage from the same letter: 
 
 A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in 
 blood. He would feel some apprehension at being called to 
 a tremendous account for engaging in so deep a play without 
 any knowledge of the game. It is no excuse for presumptuous 
 ignorance that it is directed by insolent passion. The poorest 
 being that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from 
 injustice and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes 
 of God and man. But I cannot conceive any existence under 
 heaven (which in the depths of its wisdom tolerates all sorts 
 of things) that is more truly odious and disgusting than an 
 impotent, helpless creature, without civil wisdom or military 
 skill, bloated with pride and arrogance, calling for battles 
 which he is not to fight, and contending for a violent dominion 
 which he can never exercise. . . . 
 
 If you and I find our talents not of the great and ruling 
 kind, our conduct at least is conformable to our faculties. 
 No man's life pays the forfeit of our rashness. No desolate 
 widow weeps tears of blood over our ignorance. Scrupulous 
 and sober in a well-grounded distrust of ourselves, we would 
 keep in the port of peace and security; and perhaps in re- 
 commending to others something of the same diffidence, we 
 should show ourselves more charitable to their welfare than 
 injurious to their abilities. 
 
 You have laughed over Burke's account of how 
 all Lord Talbot's schemes for the reform of the 
 king's household were dashed to pieces, because 
 the turnspit of the king's kitchen was a Member 
 of Parliament. You have often pondered over that 
 miraculous passage in his speech on the Nabob of 
 Arcot's debts, describing the devastation of the 
 Carnatic by Hyder Ali — a passage which Mr. John 
 Morley says fills the young orator with the same 
 emotions of enthusiasm, emulation, and despair 
 that (according to the same authority) invariably 
 torment the artist who first gazes on The Madonna 
 at Dresden, or the figures of Night and Dawn at 
 Florence. All these things you know, else are you 
 mighty self-denying of your pleasures. But it is just
 
 174 EDMUND BURKE 
 
 possible you may have forgotten the following extract 
 
 from one of Burke's farming letters to Arthur Young : 
 
 One of the grand points in controversy (a controversy 
 indeed chiefly carried on between practice and speculation) 
 is that of deep ploughing. In your last volume you seem, on 
 the whole, rather against that practice, and have given several 
 reasons for your judgment which deserve to be very well 
 considered. In order to know how we ought to plough, we 
 ought to know what end it is we propose to ourselves in that 
 operation. The first and instrumental end is to divide the 
 soil; the last and ultimate end, so far as regards the plants, 
 is to facilitate the pushing of the blade upwards, and the 
 shooting of the roots in all the inferior directions. There is 
 further proposed a more ready admission of external influences 
 — the rain, the sun, the air, charged with all those hetero- 
 geneous contents, some, possibly all, of which are necessary 
 for the nourishment of the plants. By ploughing deep you 
 answer these ends in a greater mass of the soil. This would 
 seem in favour of deep ploughing as nothing else than accom- 
 plishing, in a more perfect manner, those very ends for which 
 you are induced to plough at all. But doubts here arise, only 
 to be solved by experiment. First, is it quite certain that it 
 is good for the ear and grain of farinaceous plants that their 
 roots should spread and descend into the ground to the 
 greatest possible distances and depths ? Is there not some 
 limit in this ? We know that in timber, what makes one part 
 flourish does not equally conduce to the benefit of all; and 
 that which may be beneficial to the wood, does not equally 
 contribute to the quantity and goodness of the fruit; and, 
 vice versa, that what increases the fruit largely is often far 
 from serviceable to the tree. Secondly, is that looseness to 
 great depths, supposing it is useful to one of the species of 
 plants, equally useful to all ? Thirdly, though the external 
 influences — the rain, the sun, the air — act undoubtedly a 
 part, and a large part, in vegetation, does it follow that they 
 are equally salutary in any quantities, at any depths ? Or 
 that, though it may be useful to diffuse one of these agents as 
 extensively as may be in the earth, that therefore it will be 
 equally useful to render the earth in the same degree pervious 
 to all ? It is a dangerous way of reasoning in physics, as well 
 as morals, to conclude, because a given proportion of anything 
 is advantageous, that the double will be quite as good, or that 
 it will be good at all. Neither in the one nor the other is it 
 always true that two and two make four. 
 
 This is magnificent, but it is not farming, and 
 you will easily believe that Burke's attempts to
 
 EDMUND BURKE 175 
 
 till the soil were more costly than productive. 
 Farming, if it is to pay, is a pursuit of small 
 economies ; and Burke was far too Asiatic, tropical, 
 and splendid to have anything to do with small 
 economies. His expenditure, like his rhetoric, 
 was in the " grand style." He belongs to Charles 
 Lamb's great race, " the men who borrow." But 
 indeed it was not so much that Burke borrowed 
 as that men lent. Right-feehng men did not wait 
 to be asked. Dr. Brocklesby, that good physician, 
 whose name breathes like a benediction through 
 the pages of the biographies of the best men of 
 his time, who soothed Dr. Johnson's last melan- 
 choly hours, and for whose supposed heterodoxy 
 the dying man displayed so tender a solicitude, 
 wrote to Burke, in the strain of a timid suitor 
 proposing for the hand of a proud heiress, to know 
 whether Burke would be so good as to accept 
 jfiooo at once, instead of waiting for the writer's 
 death. Burke felt no hesitation in obliging so 
 old a friend. Garrick, who, though fond of money, 
 was as generous-hearted a fellow as ever brought 
 down a house, lent Burke £1000. Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds, who has been reckoned stingy, by his 
 will left Burke ^^2000, and forgave him another 
 3^2000 which he had lent him. The Marquis of 
 Rockingham by his will directed all Burke's bonds 
 held by him to be cancelled. They amounted to 
 3^30,000. Burke's patrimonial estate was sold by 
 him for ^^4000; and I have seen it stated that he 
 had received altogether from family sources as 
 much as £20,000. And yet he was always poor, 
 and was glad at the last to accept pensions from 
 the Crown in order that he might not leave his
 
 176 EDMUND BURKE 
 
 wife a beggar. This good lady survived her illus- 
 trious husband twelve years, and seemed as his 
 widow to have some success in paying his bills, 
 for at her death all remaining demands were found 
 to be discharged. For receiving this pension Burke 
 was assailed by the Duke of Bedford, a most 
 pleasing act of ducal fatuity, since it enabled the 
 pensioner, not bankrupt of his wit, to write a 
 pamphlet, now of course a cherished classic, and 
 introduce into it a few paragraphs about the House 
 of Russell and the cognate subject of grants from 
 the Crown. But enough of Burke's debts and 
 difficulties, which I only mention because all 
 through his life they were cast up against him. 
 Had Burke been a moralist of the calibre of Charles 
 James Fox, he might have amassed a fortune large 
 enough to keep up half-a-dozen Beaconsfields, by 
 simply doing what all his predecessors in the office 
 he held, including Fox's own father, the truly in- 
 famous first Lord Holland, had done — namely, by 
 retaining for his own use the interest on all balances 
 of the public money from time to time in his hands 
 as Paymaster of the Forces. But Burke carried his 
 passion for good government into actual practice, 
 and, cutting down the emoluments of his office to 
 a salary (a high one, no doubt), effected a saving 
 to the country of some ^25,000 a year, every 
 farthing of which might have gone without remark 
 into his own pocket. 
 
 Burke had no vices, save of style and temper; 
 nor was any of his expenditure a profligate squan- 
 dering of money. It all went in giving employment 
 or disseminating kindness. He sent the painter 
 Barry to study art in Italy. He saved the poet
 
 EDMUND BURKE 177 
 
 Crabbe from starvation and despair, and thus 
 secured to the country one who owns the un- 
 rivalled distinction of having been the favourite 
 poet of the three greatest intellectual factors of 
 the age (scientific men excepted) — Lord Byron, 
 Sir Walter Scott, and Cardinal Newman. Yet so 
 distorted are men's views that the odious and 
 anti-social excesses of Fox at the gambling-table 
 are visited with a blame usually wreathed in 
 smiles, whilst the financial irregularities of a noble 
 and pure-minded man are thought fit matter for 
 the fiercest censure or the most lordly contempt. 
 
 Next to Burke's debts, some of his companions 
 and intimates did him harm and injured his con- 
 sequence. His brother Richard, in Goldsmith's 
 words " so provoking a devil " that it was perhaps 
 easy to forgive his gambling propensities. Then 
 there was another Mr. Burke, who was no rela- 
 tion, but none the less was always about, and to 
 whom it was not safe to lend money. Burke's 
 son, too, whose death he mourned so pathetically, 
 seems to have been a failure, and is described by a 
 candid friend as a nauseating person. To have a 
 decent following is important in politics. 
 
 A third reason must be given: Burke's judgment 
 of men and things was often both wrong and 
 violent. The story of Powell and Bembridge, two 
 knaves in Burke's own office, whose cause he 
 espoused, and whom he insisted on reinstating in 
 the public service after they had been dismissed, and 
 maintaining them there, in spite of all protests, till 
 the one had the grace to cut his throat, and the other 
 was sentenced by the Queen's Bench to a term of 
 imprisonment and a heavy fine, is too long to be told, 
 
 I M
 
 178 EDMUND BURKE 
 
 though it makes interesting reading in the twenty- 
 second volume of Howell's State Trials, where at the 
 end of the report is to be found the following note : 
 
 The proceedings against Messrs. Powell and Bembridge 
 occasioned much animated discussion in the House of Com- 
 mons, in which Mr. Burke warmly supported the accused. 
 The compassion which on these and all other occasions was 
 manifested by Mr. Burke for the sufferings of those public 
 delinquents, the zeal with which he advocated their cause, 
 and the eagerness with which he endeavoured to extenuate 
 their criminality, have received severe reprehension, and in 
 particular when contrasted with his subsequent conduct in 
 the prosecution of Mr. Hastings. 
 
 The real reason for Burke's belief in Bembridge 
 is, I think, to be found in the evidence Burke gave 
 on his behalf at the trial before Lord Mansfield. 
 Bembridge had rendered Burke invaluable assist- 
 ance in carrying out his reforms at the Paymaster's 
 Office, and Burke was constitutionally unable to 
 believe that a rogue could be on his side; but, 
 indeed, Burke was too apt to defend bad causes 
 with a scream of passion, and a politician who 
 screams is never likely to occupy a commanding 
 place in the House of Commons. A last reason 
 for Burke's exclusion from high office is to be 
 found in his aversion to any measure of Parlia- 
 mentary Reform. An ardent reformer like the 
 Duke of Richmond — the then Duke of Richmond 
 — who was in favour of annual parliaments, 
 universal suffrage, and payment of members, was 
 not likely to wish to associate himself too closely 
 with a politician who wept with emotion at the 
 bare thought of depriving Old Sarum of parlia- 
 mentary representation. 
 
 These reasons account for Burke's exclusion, and 
 jealous as we naturally and properly are of genius
 
 EDMUND BURKE 179 
 
 being snubbed by mediocrity, my reading at all 
 events does not justify me in blaming anyone but 
 the Fates for the circumstance that Burke was 
 never a Secretary of State. And after all, does it 
 matter much what he was ? Burke no doubt 
 occasionally felt his exclusion a little hard; but 
 he is the victor who remains in possession of the 
 field; and Burke is now, for us and for all coming 
 after us, in such possession. 
 
 It now only remains for me, drawing upon my 
 stock of assurance, to essay the analysis of the 
 essential elements of Burke's mental character, 
 and I therefore at once proceed to say that it 
 was Burke's peculiarity and his glory to apply the 
 imagination of a poet of the first order to the facts 
 and the business of life. Arnold says of Sophocles: 
 He saw life steadily, and saw it whole. 
 
 Substitute for the word " life " the words 
 " organised society," and you get a peep into 
 Burke's mind. There was a cathohcity about his 
 gaze. He knew how the whole world lived. Every- 
 thing contributed to this : his vast desultory read- 
 ing; his education, neither wholly academical nor 
 entirely professional; his long years of apprentice- 
 ship in the service of knowledge; his wanderings 
 up and down the country; his vast conversational 
 powers; his enormous correspondence with all sorts 
 of people; his unfailing interest in all pursuits, 
 trades, manufactures, — all helped to keep before 
 him, like motes dancing in a sunbeam, the huge 
 organism of modern society, which requires for its 
 existence and for its development the maintenance 
 of credit and of order. Burke's imagination led 
 him to look out over the whole land : the legislator
 
 i8o EDMUND BURKE 
 
 devising new laws, the judge expounding and 
 enforcing old ones, the merchant despatching his 
 goods and extending his credit, the banker ad- 
 vancing the money of his customers upon the 
 credit of the merchant, the frugal man slowly 
 accumulating the store which is to support him 
 in old age, the ancient institutions of Church and 
 University with their seemly provisions for sound 
 learning and true religion, the parson in his pulpit, 
 the poet pondering his rhymes, the farmer eyeing 
 his crops, the painter covering his canvases, the 
 player educating the feelings. Burke saw all this 
 with the fancy of a poet, and dwelt on it with the 
 eye of a lover. But love is the parent of fear, and 
 none knew better than Burke how thin is the lava 
 layer between the costly fabric of society and the 
 volcanic heats and destroying flames of anarchy. 
 He trembled for the fair frame of all established 
 things, and to his horror saw men, instead of 
 covering the thin surface with the concrete, digging 
 in it for abstractions, and asking fundamental 
 questions about the origin of society, and why one 
 man should be born rich and another poor. Burke 
 was no prating optimist : it was his very know- 
 ledge how much could be said against society that 
 quickened his fears for it. There is no shallower 
 criticism than that which accuses Burke in his 
 later years of apostasy from so-called Liberal 
 opinions. Burke was all his life through a passionate 
 maintainer of the established order of things, and 
 a ferocious hater of abstractions and metaphysical 
 politics. The same ideas that explode hke bombs 
 through his diatribes against the French Revolu- 
 tion are to be found shining with a mild effulgence
 
 EDMUND BURKE i8i 
 
 in the comparative calm of his earher writings, I 
 have often been struck with a resemblance, which 
 I hope is not wholly fanciful, between the attitude 
 of Burke's mind towards government and that of 
 Cardinal Newman towards religion. Both these 
 great men belong, by virtue of their imaginations, 
 to the poetic order, and they both are to be found 
 dwelling with amazing eloquence, detail, and wealth 
 of illustration on the varied elements of society. 
 Both seem as they write to have one hand on the 
 pulse of the world, and to be for ever alive to the 
 throb of its action; and Burke, as he regarded 
 humanity swarming like bees into and out of their 
 hives of industry, is ever asking himself. How are 
 these men to be saved from anarchy ? whilst New- 
 man puts to himself the question. How are these 
 men to be saved from atheism ? Both saw the perils 
 of free inquiry divorced from practical affairs. 
 
 " Civil freedom," says Burke, " is not, as many 
 have endeavoured to persuade you, a thing that 
 Hes hid in the depth of abstruse science. It is a 
 blessing and a benefit, not an abstract speculation; 
 and all the just reasoning that can be upon it is 
 of so coarse a texture as perfectly to suit the 
 ordinary capacities of those who are to enjoy and 
 of those who are to defend it." 
 
 " Tell men," says Cardinal Newman, " to gain 
 notions of a Creator from His works, and if they 
 were to set about it (which nobody does), they 
 would be jaded and wearied by the labyrinth they 
 were tracing; their minds would be gorged and 
 surfeited by the logical operation. To most men 
 argument makes the point in hand more doubtful 
 and considerably less impressive. After all, man
 
 i82 EDMUND BURKE 
 
 is not a reasoning animal, he is a seeing, feeling, 
 contemplating, acting animal." 
 
 Burke is fond of telling us that he is no lawyer, 
 no antiquarian, but a plain, practical man; and the 
 Cardinal, in like manner, is ever insisting that he is no 
 theologian — ^he leaves everything of that sort to the 
 Schools, whatever they may be, and simply deals with 
 religion on its practical side as a benefit to mankind. 
 
 If either of these great men has been guilty of 
 intellectual excesses, those of Burke may be attri- 
 buted to his dread of anarchy, those of Newman 
 to his dread of atheism. Neither of them was pre- 
 pared to rest content with a scientific frontier, an 
 imaginary line. So much did they dread their 
 enemy, so alive were they to the terrible strength 
 of some of his positions, that they could not agree 
 to dispense with the protection afforded by the 
 huge mountains of prejudice and the ancient rivers 
 of custom. The sincerity of either man can only 
 be doubted by the bigot and the fool. 
 
 But Burke, apart from his fears, had a constitu- 
 tional love for old things, simply because they were 
 old. Anything mankind had ever worshipped, or 
 venerated, or obeyed, was dear to him. I have 
 already referred to his providing his Brahmins 
 with a greenhouse for the purpose of their rites, 
 which he watched from outside with great interest. 
 One cannot fancy Cardinal Newman peeping 
 through a window to see men worshipping false 
 though ancient gods. Warren Hastings's high- 
 handed dealings with the temples and time- 
 honoured if scandalous customs of the Hindoos 
 filled Burke with horror. So, too, he respected 
 Quakers, Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists,
 
 EDMUND BURKE 183 
 
 and all those whom he called Constitutional Dis- 
 senters. He has a fine passage somewhere about 
 Rust, for with all his passion for good government 
 he dearly loved a little rust. In this phase of 
 character he reminds one not a little of another 
 great writer — whose death literature has still 
 reason to deplore — George Eliot; who, in her 
 love for old hedge-rows and barns and crumbling 
 moss-grown walls, was a writer after Burke's own 
 heart, whose novels he would have sat up all night 
 to devour; for did he not deny with warmth 
 Gibbon's statement that he had read all five 
 volumes of Evelina in a day ? " The thing is 
 impossible," cried Burke; " they took me three 
 days doing nothing else." Now, Evelina is a good 
 novel, but Silas Marner is a better. 
 
 Wordsworth has been called the High Priest of 
 Nature. Burke may be called the High Priest of 
 Order — a lover of settled ways, of justice, peace, 
 and security. His writings are a storehouse of 
 wisdom, not the cheap shrewdness of the mere 
 man of the world, but the noble, animating wisdom 
 of one who has the poet's heart as well as the 
 statesman's brain. Nobody is fit to govern this 
 country who has not drunk deep at the springs of 
 Burke. " Have you read your Burke .? " is at least 
 as sensible a question to put to a parliamentary 
 candidate, as to ask him whether he is a total 
 abstainer or a desperate drunkard. Something 
 there may be about Burke to regret, and more to 
 dispute; but that he loved justice and hated 
 iniquity is certain, as also it is that for the most 
 part he dwelt in the paths of purity, humanity, and 
 good sense. May we be found adhering to them!
 
 STERNE 
 
 1894 
 
 NO less pious a railway director than Sir 
 Edward Watkin once prefaced an oration 
 to the shareholders of one of his numerous 
 undertakings by expressing, in broken accents, the 
 wish that " He who tempers the wind to the shorn 
 lamb might deal gently with illustrious personages 
 in their present grievous affliction." The wish was 
 a kind one, and is only referred to here as an 
 illustration of the amazing skill of the author 
 of the phrase quoted in so catching the tone, 
 temper, and style of King James's version, that 
 the words occur to the feeling mind as naturally 
 as any in Holy Writ as the best expression of a 
 sorrowful emotion. 
 
 The phrase itself is, indeed, an excellent example 
 of Sterne's genius for pathos. No one knew better 
 than he how to drive words home. George Herbert, 
 in his selection of Outlandish Proverbs, to which 
 he subsequently gave the alternate title Jacula 
 Prudentum, has the following: "To a close-shorn 
 sheep God gives wind by measure"; but this 
 proverb in that wording would never have suc- 
 ceeded in making the chairman of a railway 
 company believe he had read it somewhere in the 
 Bible. It is the same thought, but the words 
 which convey it stop far short of the heart. 
 A close-shorn sheep will not brook comparison 
 with Sterne's "shorn lamb"; whilst the tender, 
 
 184
 
 STERNE 185 
 
 compassionate, beneficent " God tempers the 
 wind " makes the original " God gives wind 
 by measure" wear the harsh aspect of a wholly- 
 unnecessary infliction. 
 
 Sterne is our best example of the plagiarist 
 whom none dare make ashamed. He robbed 
 other men's orchards with both hands; and yet 
 no more original writer than he ever went to press 
 in these isles. 
 
 He has been dogged, of course; but, as was 
 befitting in his case, it has been done pleasantly. 
 Sterne's detective was the excellent Dr. Ferriar, 
 of Manchester, whose Illustrations of Sterne, first 
 published in 1798, were written at an earlier date 
 for the edification of the Manchester Literary and 
 Philosophical Society. Those were pleasant days, 
 when men of reading were content to give their 
 best thoughts first to their friends and then — ten 
 years afterwards — to the public. 
 
 Dr. Ferriar's book is worthy of its subject. The 
 motto on the title-page is delightfully chosen. It 
 is taken from the opening paragraph of Lord 
 Shaftesbury's Miscellaneous Reflections: " Peace 
 be with the soul of that charitable and courteous 
 Author who for the common benefit of his fellow- 
 Authors introduced the ingenious way of Miscel- 
 laneous Writing." Here Dr. Ferriar stopped; 
 but I will add the next sentence: " It must be 
 owned that since this happy method was estab- 
 lished the Harvest of Wit has been more plentiful 
 and the I>abourers more in number than hereto- 
 fore." Wisely, indeed, did Charles Lamb declare 
 Shaftesbury was not too genteel for him. No 
 pleasanter penance for random thinking can be
 
 i86 STERNE 
 
 devised than spending an afternoon turning over 
 Shaftesbury's three volumes and trying to discover 
 how near he ever did come to saying that " Ridicule 
 was the test of truth." 
 
 Dr. Ferriar's happy motto puts the reader in a 
 sweet temper to start with, for he sees at once that 
 the author is no pedantic, soured churl, but a good 
 fellow who is going to make a little sport with a 
 celebrated wit, and show you how a genius fills 
 his larder. 
 
 The first thing that strikes you in reading Dr. 
 Ferriar's book is the marvellous skill with which 
 Sterne has created his own atmosphere and char- 
 acters, in spite of the fact that some of the most 
 characteristic remarks of his characters are, in 
 the language of the Old Bailey, " stolen goods." 
 " ' There is no cause but one,' replied my Uncle 
 Toby, ' why one man's nose is longer than another's, 
 but because God pleases to have it so.' ' That is 
 Grangousier's solution,' said my father. ' 'Tis he,' 
 continued my Uncle Toby, looking up and not 
 regarding my father's interruption, ' who makes 
 us all, and frames and puts us together in such 
 forms and proportions and for such ends as is 
 agreeable to His infinite wisdom.' " 
 
 '^' ' Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth 
 speaketh ' ; and if those are not the words of my 
 Uncle Toby, it is idle to believe in anything " : 
 and yet we read in Rabelais — as, indeed, Sterne 
 suggests to us we should — " ' Pour-quoi,' dit Gar- 
 gantua, ' est-ce que frere Jean a si beau nez ? ' 
 ' Parce,' repondit Grangousier, ' qu'ainsi Dieu I'a 
 voulujlequelnous fait en telle forme et a telle fin selon 
 son divin arbitre, que fait un potier ses vaisseaux. 
 
 J j>
 
 STERNE 187 
 
 To create a character and to be able to put in 
 his mouth borrowed words which yet shall quiver 
 with his personality is the supreme triumph of the 
 greatest " miscellaneous writer " who ever lived. 
 
 Dr. Ferriar's book, after all, but establishes this : 
 that the only author whom Sterne really pillaged is 
 Burton, of the Anatomy of Melancholy^ a now well- 
 known writer, but who in Sterne's time, despite 
 Dr. Johnson's partiality, appears to have been 
 neglected. Sir Walter Scott, an excellent authority 
 on such a point, says, in his Life of Sterne, that Dr. 
 Ferriar's essay raised the " Anatomy of Melancholy 
 to double price in the book market." 
 
 Sir Walter is unusually hard upon Sterne in this 
 matter of the Anatomy. But different men, dif- 
 ferent methods. Sir Walter had his own way of 
 cribbing. Sterne's humorous conception of the 
 character of the elder Shandy required copious 
 illustration from learned sources, and a whole host 
 of examples and whimsicalities, which it would 
 have passed the wit of man to invent for himself. 
 He found these things to his hand in Burton, 
 and, like our first parent, " he scrupled not to 
 eat." It is not easy to exaggerate the extent of 
 his plunder. The well-known chapter with its 
 refrain, " The Lady Baussiere rode on," and the 
 chapter on the death of Brother Bobby, are almost, 
 though not altogether, pure Burton. 
 
 The general effect of it all is to raise your opinion 
 immensely — of Burton. As for your opinion of 
 Sterne as a man of conduct, is it worth while having 
 one ? It is a poor business bludgeoning men who 
 bore the brunt of life a long century ago, and whose 
 sole concern now with the world is to delight it.
 
 i88 STERNE 
 
 Laurence Sterne is not standing for Parliament. 
 " Eliza " has been dead a dozen decades. Nobody 
 covers his sins under the cloak of this particular 
 parson. Our sole business is with Tristram Shandy 
 and The Sentimental Journey; and if these books 
 are not matters for congratulation and joy, then 
 the pleasures of literature are all fudge, and the 
 whole thing a got-up job of " The Trade " and the 
 hungry crew who go buzzing about it. 
 
 Mr. Traill concludes his pleasant Life of Sterne 
 in a gloomy vein, which I cannot for the life of me 
 understand. He says : " The fate of Richardson 
 might seem to be close behind him " (Sterne). 
 Even the fate of Clarissa is no hard one. She 
 still numbers good intellects, and bears her century 
 lightly. Diderot, as Mr. Traill reminds us, praised 
 her outrageously — but Mr. Ruskin is not far behind ; 
 and from Diderot to Ruskin is a good " drive." 
 But Tristram is a very different thing from Clarissa. 
 I should have said, without hesitation, that it was 
 one of the most popular books in the language. Go 
 where you will amongst men — old and young, 
 undergraduates at the Universities, readers in our 
 great cities, old fellows in the country, judges, 
 doctors, barristers — if they have any tincture of 
 literature about them, they all know their Shandy 
 at least as well as their Pickwick. What more can 
 be expected ? " True Shandeism," its author 
 declares, " think what you will against it, 
 opens the heart and lungs." I will be bound 
 to say Sterne made more people laugh in 1893 
 than in any previous year; and, what is more, 
 he will go on doing it — " ' that is, if it please 
 God,' said my Uncle Toby."
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD 
 1906 
 
 BUY good books and read them; the best 
 books are the commonest, and the last 
 editions are always the best, if the editors 
 are not blockheads." So wrote Lord Chesterfield 
 to his son, that highly-favoured and much be- 
 written youth, on March 19th, 1750, and his words 
 have been chosen with great cunning by Mr. 
 Charles Strachey as a motto for his new edition 
 of these famous letters.^ 
 
 The quotation is full of the practical wisdom, 
 but is at the same time — so much, at least, an old 
 book-collector may be allowed to say — a little 
 suggestive of the too-well-defined hmitations of 
 their writer's genius and character. Lord Chester- 
 field is always clear and frequently convincing, 
 yet his wisdom is that of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, 
 and not only never points in the direction of the 
 Celestial City, but seldom displays sympathy with 
 any generous emotion or liberal taste. Yet as we 
 have nobody like him in the whole body of our 
 hterature, we can welcome even another edition — 
 portable, complete, and cheap — of his letters to 
 his son with as much enthusiasm as is compatible 
 with the graces, and with the maxim, so dear to 
 his lordship's heart. Nil admirari I 
 
 What, I have often wondered, induced Lord 
 Chesterfield to write this enormously long and 
 
 ' Published by Methuen and Co. in two volumes. 
 
 189
 
 190 LORD CHESTERFIELD 
 
 troublesome series of letters to a son who was 
 not even his heir ? Their sincerity cannot be 
 called in question. William Wilberforce did not 
 more fervently desire the conversion to God of 
 his infant Samuel than apparently did Lord 
 Chesterfield the transformation of his lumpish 
 offspring into " the all-accomplished man " he 
 wished to have him. 
 
 " All this," so the father writes in tones of 
 fervent pleading — " all this you may compass if 
 you please. You have the means, you have the 
 opportunities; employ them, for God's sake, while 
 you may, and make yourself the all-accomplished 
 man I wish to have you. It entirely depends upon 
 the next two years; they are the decisive ones " 
 (Letter clxxvii.). 
 
 It is the very language of an evangelical piety 
 applied to the manufacture of a worldling. But 
 what promoted the anxiety ? Was it natural 
 affection — a father's love ? If it was, never before 
 or since has that world-wide and homely emotion 
 been so concealed. There is a detestable, a forbid- 
 ding, an all-pervading harshness of tone throughout 
 this correspondence that seems to banish affection, 
 to murder love. Read Letter clxxviii., and judge 
 for yourselves. I will quote a passage : 
 
 The more I love you now from the good opinion I have 
 of you, the greater will be my indignation if I should have 
 reason to change it. Hitherto you have had every possible 
 proof of my affection, because you have deserved it, but 
 when you cease to deserve it you may expect every possible 
 mark of my resentment. To lea\'e nothing doubtful upon 
 this important point, I will tell you fairly beforehand by 
 what rule I shall judge of your conduct — by Mr. Ilarte's 
 account. ... If he complains you must be guilty, and I 
 shall not have the least regard for anything you may allege 
 in your own defence.
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD 191 
 
 Ugh! what a father! Lord Chesterfield despised 
 the Gospels, and made little of St. Paul; yet the 
 New Testament could have taught him something 
 concerning the nature of a father's love. His 
 language is repulsive, repugnant, and yet how few 
 fathers have taken the trouble to write 400 educa- 
 tional letters of great length to their sons ! All one 
 can say is that Chesterfield's letters are without 
 natural affection. 
 
 If affection did not dictate these letters, what 
 did ? Could it be ambition ? So astute a man as 
 Chesterfield, who was kept well informed as to the 
 impression made by his son, could hardly suppose 
 it likely that the boy would make a name for him- 
 self, and thereby confer distinction upon the family 
 of which he was an irregular offshoot. A respect- 
 able diplomatic career, with an interval in the 
 House of Commons, was the most that so clear- 
 sighted a man could anticipate for the young 
 Stanhope. Was it literary fame for himself ? This, 
 of course, assumes that subsequent publication was 
 contemplated by the writer. The dodges and 
 devices of authors are well-nigh infinite and quite 
 beyond conjecture, and it is, of course, possible 
 that Lord Chesterfield kept copies of these letters, 
 which bear upon their faces evidence of care and 
 elaboration. It is not to be supposed for a moment 
 that he ever forgot he had written them. It is 
 hard to believe he never inquired after them and 
 their whereabouts. Great men have been known 
 to write letters which, though they bore other 
 addresses, were really intended for their bio- 
 graphers. It would not have been surprising if 
 Lord Chesterfield wrote these letters intending
 
 192 LORD CHESTERFIELD 
 
 some day to publish them, but not only is there 
 no warrant for such an opinion, but the opposite 
 is clearly established. It is, no doubt, odd that 
 the son should have carefully preserved more than 
 400 letters written to him during a period begin- 
 ning with his tenderest years and continuing whilst 
 he was travelHng on the Continent. It seems 
 almost a miracle. What made the son treasure 
 them so carefully ? Did he look forward to being 
 his father's biographer? Hardly so at the age of 
 ten, or even twenty. Biographies were not then 
 what they have since become. No doubt in the 
 middle of the eighteenth century letters were more 
 treasured than they are to-day, and young Stan- 
 hope's friends may also have thought it wise to 
 encourage him to preserve documentary evidence 
 of the great interest taken in him by his father. 
 None the less, I think the preservation of this 
 correspondence is in the circumstances a most 
 extraordinary though well-established fact. 
 
 The son died in 1768 of a dropsy at Avignon, 
 and the news was communicated to the Earl by 
 his daughter-in-law, Mrs. Eugenia Stanhope, of 
 whose existence he was previously unaware. Two 
 grandsons accompanied her. It was a shock; but 
 " les manieres nobles et aisees, la tournure d'un 
 homme de condition, le ton de la bonne compagnie, 
 les graces, le je ne s^ais quoi qui plait," came to 
 Lord Chesterfield's assistance, and he received his 
 son's widow, who was not a pleasing person, and 
 her two boys with kindness and good feeling, and 
 provided for them quite handsomely by his will. 
 The Earl died in 1773, in his seventy-ninth year, 
 and thereupon Mrs. Stanhope, who was in posses-
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD 193 
 
 sion of all the original letters addressed to her late 
 husband, carried her wares to market, and made 
 a bargain with Mr. Dodsley for their publication, 
 she to receive £iS7S- -^r- Dodsley advertised the 
 forthcoming work, and on that the Earl's executors, 
 relying upon the well-known case of Pope v. Curl, 
 decided by Lord Hardwicke in 1741, filed their bill 
 against Mrs. Stanhope, seeking an injunction to 
 restrain publication. The widow put in her sworn 
 Answer, in which she averred that she had, on 
 more occasions than one, mentioned publication 
 to the Earl, and that he, though recovering from 
 her certain written characters of eminent con- 
 temporaries, had seemed quite content to let her 
 do what she liked with the letters, only remarking 
 that there was too much Latin in them. The 
 executors seem to have moved for what is called 
 an interim injunction — that is, an injunction until 
 trial of the cause, and, from the report in Amblery 
 it appears that Lord Apsley (a feeble creature) 
 granted such an injunction, but recommended the 
 executors to permit the publication if, on seeing a 
 copy of the correspondence, they saw no objection 
 to it. In the result the executors gave their con- 
 sent, and the publication became an authorised 
 one, so much so that Dodsley was able to obtain 
 an interdict in the Scotch Court preventing a 
 certain Scotch bookseller, called McFarquhar, 
 from reprinting the letters in Edinburgh. 
 
 Whether the executors believed Mrs. Stanhope's 
 story, or saw no reason to object to the publication 
 of the letters, I do not know, but it is clear that 
 the opposition was a half-hearted one. 
 
 It would be hasty to assume that Lord Chester- 
 
 I N
 
 194 LORD CHESTERFIELD 
 
 field wrote these letters with any intention of 
 publication, and I am therefore left without being 
 able to suggest any strong reason for their exist- 
 ence. A restless, itching pen, perhaps, accounts 
 for them. Some men find a pleasure in writing, 
 even at great length; others, of whom Carlyle was 
 one, though they hate the labour, are yet compelled 
 by some fierce necessity to blacken paper. 
 
 At all events, we have Lord Chesterfield's letters, 
 and, having them, they will always have readers, 
 for they are readable. 
 
 That the letters are full of wit and wisdom and 
 sound advice is certain. Mr. Strachey, in his 
 preface, seems to be under the impression that in 
 the popular estimate Chesterfield is reckoned an 
 elegant trifler, a man of no serious account. What 
 the popular or vulgar estimate of Chesterfield may 
 be it would be hard to determine, nor is it of the 
 least importance, for no one who knows about 
 Lord Chesterfield can possibly entertain any such 
 opinion. How it came about that so able and 
 ambitious a man made so poor a thing out of life, 
 and failed so completely, is puzzling at first, though 
 a little study would, I think, make the reasons of 
 Chesterfield's failure plain enough. 
 
 To prove by extracts from the Letters how wise 
 a man Chesterfield was would be easy, but tire- 
 some; to exhibit him in a repulsive character 
 would be equally easy, but spiteful. I prefer to 
 leave him alone, and to content myself with but 
 one quotation, which has a touch of both wisdom 
 and repulsiveness : 
 
 Consult your reason betimes. I do not say it will always 
 prove an unerring guide, for human reason is not infallible,
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD 195 
 
 but it will prove the least erring guide that you can follow. 
 Books and conversation may assist it, but adopt neither 
 blindly and implicitly; try both by that best rule God has 
 given to direct us — reason. Of all the truths do not decline 
 that of thinking. The host of mankind can hardly be said to 
 think; their prejudices are almost all adoptive; and in 
 general I believe it is better that it should be so, as such 
 common prejudices contribute more to order and quiet than 
 their own separate reasonings would do, uncultivated as they 
 are. We have many of these useful prejudices in this country 
 which I should be very sorry to see removed. The good 
 Protestant conviction that the Pope is both Antichrist and 
 the Whore of Babylon is a more effectual preservative against 
 Popery than all the solid and unanswerable arguments of 
 Chillingworth.
 
 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 
 
 A LECTURE 
 1892 
 
 IT is difficult to describe mankind either in a 
 book or in a breath, and none but the most 
 determined of philosophers or the most des- 
 perate of cynics have attempted to do so, either 
 in one way or the other. Neither the philosophers 
 nor the cynics can be said to have succeeded. The 
 descriptions of the former are not recognisable, 
 and therefore, as descriptions at all events, what- 
 ever may be their other merits, must be pronounced 
 failures; whilst those of the cynics describe some- 
 thing which bears to ordinary human nature only 
 the same sort of resemblance that chemically 
 polluted waters bear to the stream as it flows 
 higher up than the source of contamination, which 
 in this case is the cynic himself. 
 
 But though it is hard to describe mankind, it is 
 easy to distinguish between people. You may do 
 this in a great many different ways: for example, 
 and to approach my subject, there are those who 
 can read Richardson's novels, and those who can- 
 not. The inevitable third-class passenger, no doubt, 
 presents himself and clamours for a ticket : I mean 
 the man or woman who has never tried. But even 
 a lecturer should have courage, and I say boldly 
 that I provide no accommodation for that person 
 
 196
 
 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 197 
 
 to-night. If he feels aggrieved, let him seek his 
 remedy — elsewhere. 
 
 Mr. Samuel Richardson, of Salisbury Court, Fleet 
 Street, printer, was, if you have only an eye for the 
 outside, a humdrum person enough. Witlings, 
 writing about him in the magazines, have often, 
 out of consideration for their pretty little styles, 
 and in order to avoid the too frequent repetition 
 of his highly respectable if unromantic name, found 
 it convenient to dub him the " little printer." 
 
 He undoubtedly was short of stature, and, in 
 later life, obese in figure, but had he stood seven 
 feet high in his stockings, these people would never 
 have called him the " big printer." Richardson has 
 always been exposed to a strong under-current of 
 ridicule. I have known people to smile at the 
 mention of his name, as if he were a sort of man- 
 milliner — or, did the thing exist, as some day it 
 may do, a male nursery governess. It is at first 
 difficult to account for this strange colouring of the 
 bubble reputation. Richardson's life, admirable as 
 is Mrs. Barbauld's sketch, cannot be said to have 
 been written; his letters — ^those, I mean, he wrote 
 in his own name, not the nineteen volumes he made 
 his characters write — have not been reprinted for 
 more than eighty years. He of all men might be 
 suffered to live only in his works, and when we 
 turn to those works, what do we find ? Pamela and 
 Clarissa are both terribly realistic; they contain 
 passages of horror, and are in parts profoundly 
 pathetic, whilst Clarissa is desperately courageous. 
 Fielding, with all his swagger and bounce, gold lace 
 and strong language, has no more of the boldness
 
 198 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 
 
 than he has of the subhmity of the historian of 
 Clarissa Harlowe. But these qiiahties avail poor 
 Richardson nothing. The taint of afternoon tea 
 still clings to him. The facts — the harmless, nay, 
 I will say the attractive, facts — that he preferred 
 the society of ladies to that of his own sex, and 
 liked to be surrounded by these, surely not strange 
 creatures, in his gardens and grottos, first at North 
 End, Hammersmith, and afterwards at Parson's 
 Green, are still remembered against him. Life is 
 indeed full of pitfalls, if estimates of a man's genius 
 are to be formed by the garden-parties he gave, and 
 the tea he consumed a century and a quarter ago. 
 The real truth I believe to be this : we are annoyed 
 with Richardson because he violates a tradition. 
 The proper place for an eighteenth-century novelist 
 was either the pot- or the sponging-house. He ought 
 to be either disguised in liquor or confined for debt. 
 Richardson was never the one or the other. Let us 
 see how this works : take Dr. Johnson; we all know 
 how to describe him. He is our great moralist, the 
 sturdy, the severe, the pious, the man who, as 
 Carlyle puts it in his striking way, worshipped at 
 St. Clement Danes in the era of Voltaire, or, as he 
 again puts it, was our real primate, the true 
 spiritual edifier and soul's teacher of all England. 
 Well, here is one of his reminiscences : " I remem- 
 ber writing to Richardson from a sponging-house, 
 and was so sure of my deliverance through his 
 kindness and liberality, that before his reply was 
 brought I knew I could afford to joke with the 
 rascal who had me in custody, and did so over a 
 pint of adulterated wine for which at that moment 
 I had no money to pay."
 
 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 199 
 
 Now, there we have the true, warm-hearted 
 Hterary tradition of the eighteenth century. It 
 is very amusing, it is full of good feeling and 
 fellowship, but the morality of the transaction 
 from the great moralist's point of view is surely, 
 like his hnen, a trifle dingy. The soul's teacher of 
 all England, laid by the heels in a sponging-house, 
 and cracking jokes with a sheriff's officer over a 
 pint of wine on the chance of another man paying 
 for it, is a situation which calls for explanation. 
 It is not my place to give it. It could, I think, 
 easily be given. Dr. Johnson was, in my judgment, 
 all Carlyle declared him to be, and to have been 
 called upon to set him free was to be proudly 
 privileged, and, after all, why make such a fuss 
 about trifles ? The debt and costs together only 
 amounted to ^5 i8s., so that the six guineas 
 Richardson promptly sent more than sufficed to 
 get our " real primate " out of prison, and to pay 
 for the pint. All I feel concerned to say here is, 
 that the praise of this anecdote belongs to the 
 little printer, and not to the great lexicographer. 
 The hero of the parable of the Good Samaritan is 
 the Good Samaritan himself, and not the unfor- 
 tunate, and therefore probably foolish, traveller 
 who must need fall amongst thieves. 
 
 But if you violate traditions, and disturb people's 
 notions as to what it is becoming for you to be, to 
 do, or to suffer, you have to pay for it. An eigh- 
 teenth-century novelist who made a fortune first 
 by honest labour and the practice of frugality, and 
 wrote his novels afterwards; who was fond of the 
 society of ladies, and a vegetarian in later life; 
 who divided his time between his shop and his
 
 200 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 
 
 villa, and became in due course master of a city- 
 company, is not what we have a right to expect, 
 and makes a figure which strongly contrasts with 
 that of Richardson's great contemporary, the en- 
 tirely manly Henry Fielding, whose very name 
 rings in the true tradition; whilst as for his books, 
 to take up Tom Jones is like re-entering in middle 
 life your old college rooms, where, so at least Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes assures us, 
 
 You feel o'er you stealing 
 The old, familiar, warm, champagny, brandy-punchy feeling. 
 
 It may safely be said of Richardson that, after 
 attaining to independence, he did more good every 
 week of his life — for he was a wise and most chari- 
 table man — than Fielding was ever able to do 
 throughout the whole of his; but this cannot alter 
 the case, or excuse a violated tradition. 
 
 The position, therefore, of Richardson in our 
 literature is that of a great Nonconformist. He 
 was not manufactured according to any established 
 process. If I may employ a metaphor borrowed 
 from his own most honourable craft, he was set up 
 in a new kind of type. He was born in 1689 in a 
 Derbyshire village, the name of which, for some 
 undiscovered reason, he would never tell. The son 
 of poor parents — his father was a joiner — he had 
 never any but a village school education, nor did 
 he in later life worry much about learning, or seek, 
 as so many printers have done, to acquire foreign 
 tongues. At fourteen years of age he was bound 
 apprentice to a printer in Aldersgate Street, and 
 for seven years toiled after a fashion which would 
 certainly nowadays be forbidden by Act of Parlia- 
 ment, were there the least likelihood of anybody
 
 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 201 
 
 either demanding or performing drudgery so severe. 
 When out of his apprenticeship, he worked for 
 eight years as a compositor, reader, and overseer, 
 and then, marrying his late master's daughter, 
 set up for himself, and slowly but steadily grew 
 prosperous and respected. His first wife dying, 
 he married again, the daughter of a bookseller of 
 Bath. At the age of fifty he published his first 
 novel, Pamela. John Bunyan's life was not more 
 unlike an Archbishop of Canterbury's than was 
 Richardson's unlike the life of an ordinary English 
 novelist of his period. 
 
 This simile to Nonconformity also holds good a 
 little when we seek to ascertain the ambit of 
 Richardson's popularity. To do this we must 
 take wide views. We must not confine our atten- 
 tion to what may be called the high and dry school 
 of literary orthodoxy. There, no doubt, Richard- 
 son has his admirers, just as Spurgeon's sermons 
 have been seen peeping out from under a heap of 
 archidiaconal, and even episcopal Charges, although 
 the seat of Spurgeon's popularity is not in bishops' 
 palaces, but in shop parlours. I do not mean by 
 this that Richardson is now a popular novelist, for 
 the fact, I suppose, is otherwise; but I mean that 
 to take the measure of his popularity you must 
 look over the wide world and not merely at the 
 clans and the cliques, the noble army of writers 
 and the ever lessening body of readers, who to- 
 gether constitute what are called literary circles. 
 Of Richardson's great fame on the Continent, it 
 will be time enough to speak in a few minutes; for 
 the moment I will stop at home. Mr. Leslie Stephen, 
 who has been called to be editor of our first really
 
 202 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 
 
 great Dictionary of National Biography, and has 
 in that capacity to sit like a coroner's jury upon 
 every dead author, and to decide whether his 
 exploits are to be squeezed into one miserable 
 paragraph, or may be allowed proudly to expand 
 over a page — he, I say, pronounces Pamela to 
 be neither moral nor amusing. Pamela, who 
 through four mortal volumes thinks of nothing 
 but her virtue and how to get married according 
 to law! to be thus dismissed by her most recent, 
 most distinguished editor! But, I repeat, we must 
 take wide views. We must not be content with 
 the verdict of the university; we must seek that 
 of the kitchen: nor is the distance ever great 
 between these institutions. Two months ago a 
 cook in a family of my acquaintance, one Saturday 
 evening, when like old Caspar " her work was done," 
 suddenly bethought herself of Pamela, a book she 
 had not read since girlhood. Rest was impossible 
 — get it forthwith she must. The housemaid prof- 
 fered her The Heir of Redclyffe, and the kitchen- 
 maid, a somewhat oppressed damsel, timidly 
 produced Gates Ajar. The cook was not to be 
 trifled with after any such feeble fashion. The 
 spell of Pamela was upon her, and out she sallied, 
 arrayed in her majesty, to gratify her soul's desire. 
 Had she been a victim of what is called " Higher 
 Education of Women," and therefore in the habit 
 of frequenting orthodox bookshops, she would 
 doubtless have found the quest at so late an hour 
 as hopeless as that of the Holy Grail; but she was 
 not that sort of person, and the shop she had in 
 her mind, and whither she straightway bent her 
 steps, was a small stationer's where are vended
 
 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 203 
 
 Family Heralds and Ballads and Pamelas-^ for the 
 latter, in cheap sixpenny guise — and I hope com- 
 plete, but for this I cannot vouch — is a book which 
 is constantly reprinted for sale amongst the poor. 
 The cook, having secured her prize, returned home 
 in triumph, nor was a dinner worthy of the name 
 to be had until Pamela's virtue was rewarded, 
 which, as you doubtless remember, it only was 
 when her master brings her a licence and presses 
 for a day. She desires it may be on a Thursday, 
 and gives her reasons. He rallies her agreeably on 
 that head. The Thursday following is fixed upon. 
 She reflects seriously on the near prospect of her 
 important change of condition, and is diffident of 
 her own worthiness, and prays for humility that 
 her new condition may not be a snare to her, and 
 makes up her mind how to behave herself to the 
 servants, she herself having been one. 
 
 There are well-authenticated instances of the 
 extraordinary power Pamela possesses of affecting 
 those who are not much in the habit of reading. 
 There is a story of its being read aloud by a black- 
 smith round his anvil night after night, to a band 
 of eager rustics, all dreadfully anxious good Mr. 
 Richardson would only move on a little faster, and 
 yet unwilling to miss a single one of poor Pamela's 
 misadventures; and of their greeting by hearty 
 rounds of British cheers the happy issue out of 
 her afflictions that awaits her, namely, her marriage 
 with the cause of every one of them. 
 
 There are living writers who have written some 
 admirable novels, and I have known people to be 
 glad when they were finished, but never to the 
 pitch of three times three.
 
 204 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 
 
 I am not, of course, recommending anyone to 
 read Pamela; to do so would be an impertinence. 
 You have all done so, or tried to do so. " I do not 
 remember," says Charles Lamb, " a more whim- 
 sical surprise than having been once detected by 
 a familiar damsel, reclining at my ease upon the 
 grass on Primrose Hill, reading Pamela. There 
 was nothing in the book to make a man seriously 
 ashamed at the exposure; but as she seated her- 
 self down by me, and seemed determined to read 
 in company, I could have wished it had been — 
 any other book. We read on very socially for a 
 few pages; and not finding the author much to 
 her taste, she got up and went away. Gentle 
 casuist, I leave it to thee to conjecture whether 
 the blush (for there was one between us) was the 
 property of the nymph or the swain in the dilemma. 
 From me you shall never learn the secret." ^ 
 
 Miss Pamela Andrews was, to tell the truth, a 
 vulgar young person. There is nothing heroic or 
 romantic about her; she has not a touch or a 
 trace of the moral sublimity of Jeannie Deans, 
 who, though of the same rank of life, belonged 
 to another country and had had an entirely dif- 
 ferent up-bringing. What a reply was that of 
 Jeannie's to the Rev. Mr. Staunton, George 
 Robertson's father, when he, entirely misappre- 
 hending the purport of her famous journey, lets 
 her perceive that he fancies she is plotting for her 
 own marriage with his son. Says the father to the 
 son : " Perhaps you intend to fill up the cup of 
 disobedience and profligacy by forming a low and 
 disgraceful marriage; but let me bid you beware." 
 
 * Last Essays of Elia, 52.
 
 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 205 
 
 " If you were feared for sic a thing happening with 
 me, sir," said Jeannie, " I can only say that not 
 for all the land that lies between the twa ends of 
 the rainbow wad I be the woman that should wed 
 your son." " There is something very singular in 
 all this," said the elder Staunton; and so Pamela 
 would have thought. She, honest girl that she was, 
 was always ready to marry anybody's son, only she 
 must have the marriage lines to keep in her desk 
 and show to her dear parents. 
 
 The book's origin ought not to be overlooked. 
 Some London booksellers, knowing Mr. Richard- 
 son to be a grave man of decorous life, and with 
 a talent for moralising, desired him to write a 
 series of familiar letters on the behaviour of young 
 women going out to service for the first time; they 
 never intended a novel: they wanted a manual of 
 conduct — that conduct which, according to a precise 
 arithmetician, is three-fourths, or some other frac- 
 tion, of human life. It was in this spirit that 
 Richardson sat down to write Pamela and make 
 himself famous. He had a facile pen, and the book, 
 as it grew under his hand, outstripped its design, 
 but never lost sight of it. It was intended for 
 Pamelas, and is bourgeois to the very last degree. 
 The language is simple, but its simplicity is not 
 the noble, soul-stirring simplicity of Bunyan, nor 
 is it the manly simplicity of Cobbett, or Hugh 
 Miller: it is the ignoble, and, at times, almost the 
 odious, simplicity of a merely uncultured life. It 
 abounds in vulgar phrases and vulgar thoughts; 
 still, it reflects powerfully the scenes it portrays, 
 and you feel as you read a line affinity between 
 the communicating medium, the language, and the
 
 2o6 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 
 
 thing communicated, the story. When people said, 
 in the flush of their first enthusiasm, as they did 
 say, that there were but two good books in the 
 world, the Bible and Pamela, this is what, perhaps 
 unconsciously, they were thinking of; otherwise 
 they were talking nonsense. Pamela spoke a lan- 
 guage still understood of many, and if she was 
 not romantic or high-flown, there are others like 
 her. We are always well pleased, and it is perhaps 
 lucky for the majority of novelists that it should 
 be so, to read about people who do not in the least 
 bit resemble us; still, anyone who describes us as 
 we are, " strikes the electric chain wherewith we 
 are darkly bound," and makes humanity quiver 
 right down the centuries. Pamela was a vulgar 
 little thing, and saucy withal: her notions of hon- 
 our and dishonour were neither lofty nor pro- 
 found; but she had them, and stuck to them in 
 perilous paths along which the defenceless of her 
 sex are too often called to tread ; and when 
 finally her virtue is rewarded, and she is driven 
 off in a chariot drawn by the four long-tailed mares 
 upon whom she had been cruelly twitted for setting 
 her affections, I for one am quite prepared to join 
 with the rustics round the blacksmith's anvil in 
 loud cheers for Pamela. 
 
 Ten years after Pamela came Clarissa. It is not 
 too much to say that not only Great Britain and 
 Ireland (the latter country not yet deprived of her 
 liberties by the Act of Union, and therefore in a 
 position to pirate popular authors, after the agree- 
 able fashion of our American cousins ^), but also 
 France, Germany, and Holland, simply gulped 
 
 1 Since abandoned. Laus Deo !
 
 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 207 
 
 Clarissa down; and she was in seven volumes. It 
 was a kind of gospel, something good and some- 
 thing new. Its author was a stout tradesman of 
 sixty, but he was not in the very least degree what 
 is now called — perhaps to the point of nausea — a 
 Philistine. By a Philistine I suppose we must 
 understand someone who lives and moves and has 
 his being in the realm of ordinary stock conven- 
 tional ideas — a man who is as blind to the future 
 as he is deaf to the past. For example, that Dr. 
 Drummond, Archbishop of York, who just about 
 this very time told the Rev. Mr. Conyers, one of 
 his clergy, " that he would be better employed 
 preaching the morality of Socrates than canting 
 about the New Birth," was a Philistine — I doubt 
 not a very amiable one, but, being a Philistine, 
 he had no chance of recognising what this nascent 
 methodism was, and as for dreaming what it 
 might become — had he been capable of this — he 
 would not have been a Philistine or, probably, 
 Archbishop of York! 
 
 Richardson, on the other hand, had his quiver 
 full of new ideas; he had his face to the east; he 
 was no mere inheritor, he was a progenitor. He is, 
 in short, as has been often said, our Rousseau; his 
 characters were not stock characters. Think of 
 Fielding's characters, his Tom Joneses and Booths, 
 his Amelias and Sophias. They are stage properties 
 as old as the Plantagenets. They are quite unidea'd, 
 if I may use a word which, as applied to girls, has 
 the authority of Dr. Johnson. Fielding's men are 
 either good fellows with large appetites, which they 
 gratify openly, or sneaks with equally large appe- 
 tites, which they gratify on the sly; whilst the
 
 2o8 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 
 
 characters of his women are made to hinge solely 
 upon their willingness or unwillingness to turn a 
 blind eye. If they are ready to do this, they are 
 angels; Sophia comes upon the stage in a chapter 
 headed " A short hint of what we can do in the 
 sublime, and a description of Miss Sophia Western." 
 Poor neglected Amelia, whenever she is forgiving 
 her husband, is described as " all one blaze of 
 beauty " ; but if they are not willing to play this 
 role, why then they are unsexed and held up to the 
 ridicule and reprobation of all good fellows and 
 pretty women. This sort of thing was abhorrent 
 to the soul of the little printer; he hated Fielding's 
 boisterous drunkards with an entire hatred. I 
 believe he would have hated them almost as much 
 if Fielding had not been a rival of his fame. He 
 said he was not able to read any more than the 
 first volume of Amelia, and as for Tom Jones, in 
 the year 1750, he was audacious enough to say that 
 its run was over. Regarded merely as writers, 
 there can, I suppose, be no real rivalry between 
 Fielding and Richardson. The superiority of Field- 
 ing is apparent on every page. Wit, good-humour, 
 a superb lusty style which carries you along like a 
 pair of horses over a level moorland road, incidents, 
 adventures, inns, and all the glory of motion, high 
 spirits, huge appetites, pretty women — what a 
 catalogue it makes; of things no doubt smacking 
 of this world and the kingdom thereof, but none 
 the less delightful on that account! No wonder 
 Tom Jones is still running; where, I should like 
 to know, is the man bold enough to stop him ? But 
 for all this, Richardson was the more remarkable 
 and really interesting man of the two; and for the
 
 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 209 
 
 reason that he was the evangelist of the new senti- 
 mentahsm, that word which so puzzled one of his 
 most charming correspondents, that she wrote to 
 ask him what it meant — this new word sentimental 
 which was just beginning to be in everybody's 
 mouth. We have heard a good deal of it since. 
 
 Clarissa Harlozve has a place not merely amongst 
 English novels, but amongst English women. 
 
 It was a new thing for a woman to be described 
 as being not only in herself but by herself com- 
 mendable and altogether lovely, as triumphing in 
 her own right over the cruelest dishonour, and 
 rejecting, with a noble scorn new to literature, the 
 hand in marriage of the villain who had done her 
 wrong. The book opened the flood-gates of human 
 tears. The waters covered the earth. We cannot 
 weep as they used to do in " the brave days of old." 
 
 Listen to the wife of a Lancashire baronet: " I 
 verily believe I have shed a pint of tears, my heart 
 is still bursting though they cease not to flow at 
 this moment, nor will I fear for some time. . . . 
 Had you seen me I surely should have moved your 
 pity. When alone in agonies would I lay down the 
 book, take it up again, walk about the room, let 
 fall a flood of tears, wipe my eyes, read again, 
 perhaps not three lines, throw away the book, 
 crying out : ' Excuse me, good Mr. Richardson, I 
 cannot go on; it is your fault, you have done 
 more than I can bear'; threw myself upon my 
 couch to compose; again I read, again I acted the 
 same part, sometimes agreeably interrupted by my 
 dear man, who was at that time labouring through 
 the sixth volume with a heart capable of impres- 
 sions equal to my own — tho' the effects shown in 
 I o
 
 210 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 
 
 a more justifiable manner — ^which I believe may 
 be compared to what Mr. Belfort felt when he 
 found the beauteous sufferer in her prison-room. 
 Something rose in my throat, I knew not what, 
 which made me guggle as it were for speech." 
 
 Nor did the men escape; a most grave and 
 learned man writes: 
 
 That Pamela and Clarissa have again " obtained the honour 
 of my perusal," do you say, my dear Mr. Richardson? I 
 assure you I think it an honour to be able to say I have read, 
 and as long as I have eyes will read, all your three most 
 excellent pieces at least once a year, that I am capable of 
 doing it with increasing pleasure which is perpetually doubled 
 by the reflection, that this good man, this charming author, 
 is my friend. I have been this day weeping over the seventh 
 volume of Clarissa as if I had attended her dying bed and 
 assisted at her funeral procession. Oh, may my latter end 
 be like hers ! 
 
 It is no wonder the author of Clarissa had soon 
 a great correspondence with ladies, married and 
 single, young and old, virtuous and the reverse. 
 Had he not written seven volumes, all about a 
 girl? had he not made her beautiful, wise and 
 witty, and learned withal? had he not depicted 
 with extraordinary skill the character of the 
 fascinating — the hitherto resistless Lovelace, who, 
 though accompHshing Clarissa's ruin, does thereby 
 but establish her triumph and confound himself? 
 It is no doubt unhappily the case that far too many 
 of Richardson's fair correspondents lacked the 
 splendid courage of their master, and to his in- 
 finite annoyance fell in love with his arch-scamp, 
 and prayed his creator that Lovelace might first 
 be led to see the error of his ways, and then to the 
 altar with the divine Clarissa. But the heroic 
 printer was adamant to their cries, and he was
 
 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 211 
 
 right if ever man was. As well might King Lear 
 end happily as Clarissa Harlozve. 
 
 The seven volumes caused immense talk and 
 discussion, and it was all Clarissa, Clarissa, Clarissa, 
 Sophia Western was, as we have seen, a comely girl 
 enough, but she was as much like Clarissa as a ship 
 in dock is like a ship at sea and on fire. What can 
 you find to say of her, or to her ? ^ When you have 
 dug Tom Jones in the ribs, and called him a lucky 
 dog, and wished her happy, you turn away with a 
 yawn; but Clarissa is immense. Do you remember 
 Thackeray's account in the Roundabout Papers of 
 Macaulay's rhapsody in the Athenaeum Club ? " I 
 spoke to him once about Clarissa. ' Not read 
 Clarissa ? ' he cried out. ' If you have once 
 thoroughly entered on Clarissa and are infected 
 by it, you can't leave off. When I was in India 
 I passed one hot season at the hills, and there 
 were the governor-general, the secretary of govern- 
 ment, the commander-in-chief, and their wives. I 
 had Clarissa with me, and as soon as they began 
 to read the whole station was in a passion of ex- 
 citement about Miss Harlowe and her misfortunes, 
 and her scoundrelly Lovelace. The governor's wife 
 seized the book, and the secretary waited for it, 
 and the chief justice could not read it for tears.' 
 He acted the whole scene, he paced up and down 
 the Athenaeum Library. I dare say he could have 
 spoken pages of the book, of that book, and of 
 what countless piles of others." 
 
 I must be permitted to observe that lawyers 
 
 1 Richardson in a letter says this of her, " the weak, the insipid, 
 the runaway, the inn-frequenting Sophia"; and calls her lover 
 " her illegitimate Tom." But nobody else need say this of Sophia; 
 and as for Tom, he was declared to be a foundling from the first.
 
 212 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 
 
 have been great Richardsonians. The Rev. Mr. 
 Loftus, writing to our author from Ireland, says: 
 " I will tell you a story about your sweet girl 
 Pamela. Our late lord-chancellor,^ who was a man 
 more remarkable for the goodness of his heart than 
 even for the abilities of his head, which were of the 
 most exalted kind, was so struck with her history 
 that he sat up reading it the whole night, although 
 it was then the middle of term, and declared to his 
 family he could not find it in his heart to quit his 
 book, nor imagined it to be so late by many hours." 
 
 The eminent Serjeant Hill, though averse to 
 literature, used to set Clarissa's will before his 
 pupils, and bid them determine how many of its 
 uses and trusts could be supported in court. I 
 am sorry to have to add that in the learned Ser- 
 jeant's opinion poor Clarissa, in addition to all her 
 other misfortunes, died intestate. 
 
 All this commotion and excitement and Clarissa- 
 worship meant that something was brewing, and 
 that good Mr. Richardson, with his fat round face 
 flushed with the fire, had his ladle in the pan and 
 was busy stirring it about. What is called the 
 correspondence of Samuel Richardson, which was 
 edited by that admirable woman, Mrs. Barbauld, 
 and pubhshed in six volumes in 1804, is mostly 
 made up, not of letters from, but to, the author 
 of Clarissa. All the more effectually on that 
 account does it let us into the manufactory of his 
 mind. The letters a man receives are perhaps more 
 significant of his real character than those he 
 writes. People did not write to Mr. Richardson 
 about themselves or about their business, or about 
 
 * Jocelyn, founder of the Roden peerage.
 
 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 213 
 
 literature, unless it were to say they did not like 
 Tom Jones, or about politics, or other sports, but 
 they wrote to him about himself and his ideas, his 
 good woman, Clarissa, his good man. Sir Charles, 
 and the true relation between the sexes. They are 
 immense fun, these letters, but they ought also to 
 be taken seriously; Mr. Richardson took them as 
 seriously as he always took himself. There was, 
 perhaps, only one subject Richardson regarded as 
 of equal importance with himself, and that was 
 the position of woman. This is why he hated 
 Fielding, the triumphant, orthodox Fielding, to 
 whom man was a rollicking sinner, and woman a 
 loving slave. He pondered on this subject, until 
 the anger within him imparts to his style a virility 
 and piquancy not usually belonging to it. The 
 satire in the following extract from a letter he 
 wrote to the good lady who shed a pint of tears 
 over Clarissa is pungent : " Man is an animal that 
 must bustle in the world, go abroad, converse, 
 fight battles, encounter other dangers of seas, 
 winds, and I know not what, in order to protect, 
 provide for, maintain in ease and plenty, women. 
 Bravery, anger, fierceness are made familiar to 
 them. They buffet and are buffeted by the world; 
 are impatient and uncontrollable; they talk of 
 honour, run their heads against stone walls to 
 make good their pretensions to it, and often quarrel 
 with one another and fight duels upon any other 
 silly thing that happens to raise their choler — their 
 shadows, if you please; while women are meek, 
 passive, good creatures, who used to stay at home, 
 set their maids at work, and formerly themselves, 
 get their houses in order to receive, comfort, oblige,
 
 214 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 
 
 give joy to their fierce, fighting, busthng, active 
 protectors, providers, maintainers, divert him with 
 pretty pug's tricks, tell him soft tales of love, and 
 of who and who's together, what has been done in 
 his absence, bring to him little master, so like his 
 own dear papa, and little pretty miss, a soft, sweet, 
 smiling soul, with her sampler in her hand, so like 
 what her meek mamma was at her years." 
 
 You cannot, indeed, lay hold of many specific 
 things which Richardson advocated. Ignorant of 
 the classics himself, he was by no means disposed 
 to advocate the teaching of them to women. 
 Clarissa, indeed, knew Latin, but Harriet Byron 
 did not. The second Mrs. Richardson was just 
 a Httle bit too much for her husband, and he was 
 consequently led to hold what may be called " high 
 doctrine " as to the duty of wives obeying their 
 husbands. Though never was man less of a revolu- 
 tionary than Richardson, still he was on the side 
 of the revolution. He had an ethical system 
 different from that which stood beside him. This 
 did not escape the notice of a keen-witted con- 
 temporary, the great Smollett, whose own Roderick 
 Randoms and Peregrine Pickles are such unmiti- 
 gated, high-coloured ruffians as to induce Sir Walter 
 Scott to call him the Rubens of fiction, but who 
 none the less had an eye for the future; he in his 
 history speaks in terms of high admiration of the 
 sublime code of ethics of the author of Clarissa. 
 Richardson was fierce against duelling, and also 
 against corporal punishment. He had the courage 
 to deplore the evil effects produced by the works 
 of Homer, " that fierce, fighting Iliad,'" as he 
 called it. We may be sure his children were never
 
 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 215 
 
 allowed to play with tin soldiers, at least, not with 
 their father's consent. 
 
 Having written Clarissa, it became inevitable 
 that Richardson should proceed further and write 
 Grandison. In reading his correspondence we hail 
 Sir Charles afar off. Richardson had deeply grieved 
 to see how many of his ladies had fallen in love 
 with the scoundrelly Lovelace. It wounded him 
 to the quick, for he could not but feel that he was 
 not in the least like Lovelace himself. He turns 
 almost savagely upon some of his fair corre- 
 spondents and upbraids them, telling them indeed 
 plainly that he feared they were no better than 
 they should be. They had but one answer: " Ah, 
 dear Mr. Richardson, in Clarissa you have shown 
 us the good woman we all would be. Now show 
 us the good man we all should love." And he 
 set about doing so seriously, aye and humbly, 
 too. He writes with a sad sincerity a hundred 
 years cannot hide: 
 
 How shall a man obscurely situated, never in his life de- 
 lighting in public entertainments, nor in his youth able to 
 frequent them from narrowness of fortune; one of the most 
 attentive of men to the calls of business — his situation for 
 many years producing little but prospects of a numerous 
 family — a business that seldom called him abroad when he 
 might in the course of it see and know a little of the world, 
 as some employments give opportunities to do — naturally 
 shy and sheepish, and wanting more encouragement by smiles 
 to draw him out than anybody thought it worth their while 
 to give him — and blest (in this he will say blest) with a 
 mind that set him above dependence, and making an abso- 
 lute reliance on Providence and his own endeavours — how, 
 I say, shall such a man pretend to describe and enter into 
 characters in upper life ' 
 
 However, he set about it, and in 1754 produced 
 Sir Charles Grandison, or, as he had originally
 
 2i6 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 
 
 intended to call it, the Good Man, in six octavo 
 volumes. 
 
 I am not going to say he entirely succeeded with 
 his good man, who I know has been called an 
 odious prig. I have read Sir Charles Grandison 
 once — I cannot promise ever to read it again, 
 and yet who knows what may happen ? Sir Walter 
 Scott, in his delightful, good-humoured fashion, 
 tells a tale of a venerable lady of his acquaintance, 
 who, when she became subject to drowsy fits, 
 chose to have Sir Charles read to her as she sat in 
 her elbow chair, in preference to any other work; 
 because, said she, " should I drop asleep in the 
 course of the reading, I am sure when I awake 
 I shall have lost none of the story, but shall find 
 the party where I left them, conversing in the 
 cedar-parlour." 
 
 After Sir Charles, Richardson wrote no more. 
 Indeed, there was nothing to write about, unless 
 he had taken the advice of a morose clerical friend 
 who wrote to him : " I hope you intend to give us 
 a bad woman — expensive, imperious, lewd, and, at 
 last, a drammer. This is a fruitful and necessary 
 subject which will strike and entertain to a miracle." 
 Mr. Richardson replied jocosely that if the Rev. 
 Mr. Skelton would only sketch the she-devil for 
 him, he would find room for her somewhere, and 
 the subject dropped. The wife of the celebrated 
 German poet, Klopstock, wrote to him in her 
 broken English : " Having finished your Clarissa 
 (oh, the heavenly book!) I would prayed you to 
 write the history of a manly Clarissa, but I had 
 not courage enough at that time. I should have it 
 no more to-day, as this is only my first English
 
 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 217 
 
 letter; but I am now Klopstock's wife, and then 
 I was only the single young girl. You have since 
 written the manly Clarissa without my prayer. 
 Oh, you have done it to the great joy and thanks 
 of all your happy readers! Now you can write no 
 more. You must write the history of an Angel." 
 
 The poor lady died the following year under 
 melancholy circumstances, but her prophecy proved 
 true. Richardson wrote no more. He died in 1761, 
 seventy-two years of age. His will, after directing 
 numerous mourning-rings to be given to certain 
 friends, proceeds as follows : " Had I given rings 
 to all the ladies who have honoured me with their 
 correspondence, and whom I sincerely venerate for 
 their amiable qualities, it would even in this last 
 solemn act appear like ostentation." 
 
 It now only remains to say two or three words 
 about Richardson's great popularity abroad. Until 
 quite recently, he and Sterne may be said to have 
 been the only popular English authors abroad; 
 perhaps Goldsmith should be added to the party. 
 Foreigners never felt any difficulty about him, or 
 about the tradition he violated. The celebrated 
 author of Manon Lescaut translated Clarissa into 
 French, though it was subsequently better done 
 by a less famous hand. She was also turned into 
 German and Dutch. Foreigners, of course, could 
 not be expected to appreciate the hopeless absurdity 
 of a man who lived at Parson's Green attempting 
 to describe the upper classes. Horace Walpole when 
 in Paris did his best to make this plain, but he 
 failed. Say what he might, Clarissa lay on the 
 toilet-tables of the French princesses, and every- 
 body was raving about her. Lady Mary Wortley
 
 2i8 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 
 
 Montagu was also very angry. " Richardson," says 
 she, writing to the Countess of Bute, " has no idea 
 of the manners of high Hfe. Such hberties as pass 
 between Mr. Lovelace and his cousins are not to 
 be excused by the relation. I should have been 
 much astonished if Lord Denbigh should have 
 offered to kiss me; and I dare swear Lord Trent- 
 ham never attempted such impertinence to you." 
 To the English reader these criticisms of Lady 
 Mary's have immense value; but the French senti- 
 mentalist, with his continental insolence, did not 
 care a sou what impertinences Lord Denbigh and 
 Lord Trentham might or might not have attempted 
 towards their female cousins. He simply read his 
 Clarissa and lifted up his voice and wept : and so, 
 to do her justice, did Lady Mary herself. " This 
 Richardson," she writes, " is a strange fellow. I 
 heartily despise him and eagerly read him, nay, 
 sob over his works in a most scandalous manner." 
 
 The effect produced upon Rousseau by Richard- 
 son is historical. Without Clarissa there would 
 have been no Nouvelle Heloise, and had there been 
 no Nouvelle Helo'ise everyone of us would have been 
 somewhat different from what we are. 
 
 The elaborate eulogy of Diderot is well-known, 
 and, though extravagant in parts, is full of true 
 criticism. One sentence only I will quote : " I 
 have observed," he says, " that in a company 
 where the works of Richardson were reading either 
 privately or aloud the conversation at once became 
 more interesting and animated." This, surely, is 
 a legitimate test to which to submit a novel. You 
 sometimes hear people say of a book, " Oh, it is 
 not worth talking about ! I was only reading it."
 
 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 219 
 
 The great Napoleon was a true Richardsonian. 
 Only once did he ever seem to take any interest 
 in an Englishman. It was whilst he was first 
 consul and when he was introduced to an officer 
 called Lovelace : " Why," he exclaimed with 
 emotion, " that is the name of the man in 
 Clarissa]'^ When our own great critic, Hazlitt, 
 heard of this incident he fell in love with Napo- 
 leon on the spot, and subsequently wrote his life 
 in numerous volumes. 
 
 In Germany Clarissa had a great sale, and those 
 of you who are acquainted with German sentiment 
 will have no difiiculty in tracing a good deal of it 
 to its original fountain in Fleet Street. 
 
 As a man, Richardson had perhaps only two 
 faults. He was very nervous on the subject of his 
 health, and he was very vain. His first fault gave 
 a great deal of trouble to his wives and families, 
 his second afforded nobody anything but pleasure. 
 The vanity of a distinguished man, if at the same 
 time he happens to be a good man, is a quality so 
 agreeable in its manifestations that to look for it 
 and not to find it would be to miss a pleasure. 
 When the French poet Boileau was invited to 
 Versailles by Louis Quatorze, he was much annoyed 
 by the vanity of that monarch. " Whenever," said 
 he, " the conversation left the king's doings " — 
 and, let us guess, just approached the poet's verses 
 — " his majesty always had a yawning-fit, or sug- 
 gested a walk on the terrace." The fact is, it is not 
 vanity, but contending vanities that give pain. 
 
 As for those of you who cannot read Richard- 
 son's nineteen volumes, it can only be said you 
 are a large and intelligent class of persons. You
 
 220 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 
 
 number amongst you poets like Byron — for I pre- 
 sume Byron is still among the poets — and philo- 
 sophers like d'Alembert, who, when asked whether 
 Richardson was not right in imitating Nature, 
 replied, " Yes, but not to the point of ennui." We 
 must not bear you malice or blacken your private 
 characters. On the other hand, you must not 
 sneer at us or call us milksops. There is nothing 
 to be proud of, I can assure you, in not being able 
 to read Clarissa Harlozve, or to appreciate the 
 genius which created Lovelace. 
 
 A French critic, M. Scherer, has had the audacity 
 to doubt whether Tristram Shandy is much read 
 in England, and it is commonly asserted in France 
 that Clarissa is too good for us. Tristram may 
 be left to his sworn admirers, who could at any 
 moment take the field with all the pomp and 
 circumstance of war, but with Clarissa it is different. 
 Her bodyguard is small and is often in need of 
 recruits. This, indeed, is my apology for the 
 trouble I have put you to.
 
 EDWARD GIBBON 
 
 A LECTURE 
 1892 
 
 IT was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat 
 musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare- 
 footed fryars were singing vespers in the Temple of 
 Jupiter, that the idea of writing the Decline and Fall 
 of the City first started to my mind. 
 
 It was "on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June, 
 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote 
 the last lines of the last page, in a summer-house in my garden. 
 After laying down my pen I took several turns in a berceau, 
 or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of 
 the country, the lake and the mountains. The air was tem- 
 perate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was 
 reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. I will 
 not dissemble the first emotions of joy on recovery of my 
 freedom and perhaps of the establishment of my fame. But 
 my pride was soon humbled and a sober melancholy was 
 spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken an ever- 
 Icisting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that 
 whatever might be the future fate of my history, the life of 
 the historian must be short and precarious. 
 
 Between these two passages lies the romance of 
 Gibbon's life — a romance which must be looked 
 for, not, indeed, in the volumes, whether the 
 original quartos or the subsequent octavos, of his 
 history — but in the elements which went to make 
 that history what it is: the noble conception, the 
 shaping intellect, the mastered learning, the stately 
 diction and the daily toil. 
 
 Mr. Bagehot has declared that the way to rever- 
 ence Gibbon is not to read him at all, but to look 
 at him, from outside, in the bookcase, and think 
 
 221
 
 222 EDWARD GIBBON 
 
 how much there is within ; what a course of events, 
 what a muster-roll of names, what a steady solemn 
 sound. All Mr. Bagehot's jokes have a kernel 
 inside them. The supreme merit of Gibbon's 
 history is not to be found in deep thoughts, or in 
 wide views, or in profound knowledge of human 
 nature, or prophetic vision. Seldom was there an 
 historian less well-equipped with these fine things 
 than he. Its glory is its architecture, its structure, 
 its organism. There it is, it is worth looking at, for 
 it is invulnerable, indispensable, immortal. The 
 metaphors which have been showered upon it, 
 prove how fond people have been of looking at it 
 from the outside. It has been called a Bridge, less 
 obviously an Aqueduct, more prosaically a Road. 
 We applaud the design and marvel at the execution. 
 There is something mournful in this chorus of 
 approbation in which it is not difficult to detect 
 the notes of glad surprise. It tells a tale of in- 
 firmity both of life and purpose. A complete thing 
 staggers us. We are accustomed to failure. 
 
 What act proves all its thought had been ? 
 
 The will is weak, opportunities are barren, temper 
 uncertain, and life short. 
 
 I thought all labour, yet no less. 
 Bear up beneath their unsuccess; 
 Look at the end of work : contrast 
 The petty done — the undone vast. 
 
 It is Gibbon's triumph that he made his thoughts 
 acts. He is not exactly what you call a pious writer, 
 but he is provocative of at least one pious feeling. 
 A sabbatical calm results from the contemplation 
 of his labours. Succeeding scholars have read his
 
 EDWARD GIBBON 223 
 
 history and pronounced it good. It is likewise 
 finished. Hence this feehng of surprise. 
 
 Gibbon's life has the simplicity of an epic. His 
 work was to write his history. Nothing else was 
 allowed to rob this idea of its majesty. It brooked 
 no rival near its throne. It dominated his life, for 
 though a man of pleasure, and, to speak plainly, a 
 good bit of a coxcomb, he had always the cadences 
 of the Decline and Fall in his ears. It has been 
 wittily said of him, that he came at last to believe 
 that he was the Roman Empire, or, at all events, 
 something equally majestic and imposing. His life 
 had, indeed, its episodes, but so has an epic. 
 Gibbon's episodes are interesting, abrupt, and 
 always concluded. In his sixteenth year he, 
 without the aid of a priest or the seductions of 
 ritual, read himself into the Church of Rome, and 
 was one fine June morning in 1753 baptised by a 
 Jesuit father. By Christmas, 1754, he had read 
 himself out again. Gibbon's conversion was 
 perfectly genuine and should never be spoken of 
 otherwise than respectfully, but it was entirely a 
 matter of books and reading. " Persons influence 
 us," cries Dr. Newman, " voices melt us, looks 
 subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man will live 
 and die upon a dogma; no man will be a martyr 
 for a conclusion." It takes all sorts to make a 
 world, and our plump historian was one of those 
 whose actions are determined in libraries, whose 
 lives are unswayed by personal influences, to whom 
 conclusions may mean a great deal, but dogmas 
 certainly nothing. Whether Gibbon on leaving off 
 his Catholicism ever became a Protestant again, 
 except in the sense that Bayle declared himself
 
 224 EDWARD GIBBON 
 
 one, is doubtful. But all this makes an interesting 
 episode. The second episode is his well-known 
 love affair with Mademoiselle Curchod, afterwards 
 Madame Necker and the mother of that social 
 portent Madame de Stael. Gibbon, of course, 
 behaved badly in this affair. He fell in love, 
 made known his plight, obtained mademoiselle's 
 consent, and then speeded home to tell his father. 
 " Love," said he, " will make me eloquent." The 
 elder Gibbon would not hear of it: the younger 
 tamely acquiesced. His very acquiescence, like 
 all else about him, has become classical. " I sighed 
 as a lover, I obeyed as a son." He proceeds: " My 
 wound was insensibly healed by time, absence and 
 the habits of a new life." It is shocking. Never, 
 surely, was love so flouted before. Gibbon is 
 charitably supposed by some persons to have re- 
 gretted Paganism, but it was lucky for both him 
 and for me that the gods had abandoned Olympus, 
 since otherwise it would have required the pen of 
 a Greek dramatist to depict the horrors that must 
 have eventually overtaken him for so impious an 
 outrage; as it was, he simply grew fatter every 
 day. A very recent French biographer of Madame 
 Necker, who has published some letters of Gibbon's 
 for the first time, evidently expects his readers to 
 get very angry with this perfidious son of Albion. 
 It is much too late to get angry. Of all the many 
 wrongs women suffer at the hands of men, that of 
 not marrying them is the one they ought to find 
 it easiest to forgive; they generally do forgive. 
 Madame Necker forgave, and if she, why not you 
 and I ? Years after she welcomed Gibbon to her 
 house, and there he used to sit, fat and famous,
 
 EDWARD GIBBON 225 
 
 tapping his snuff-box and arranging his ruffles, 
 and watching with a smile of complacency the 
 infantine, yet, I doubt not, the pronounced gambols 
 of the vivacious Corinne. After Necker's fall, 
 Gibbon writes to Madame: " Your husband's con- 
 dition is always worthy of envy : he knows himself, 
 his enemies respect him, Europe admires him, you 
 love him." I decline to be angry with such a man. 
 His long residence in Switzerland, an unusual 
 thing in those days, makes a third episode, which, 
 in so far as it led him to commence author in the 
 French language, and to study Pascal as a master 
 of style, was not without its effects on his history, 
 but it never diverted him from his studies or 
 changed their channels. Though he lived fifteen 
 years in Lausanne, he never climbed a mountain 
 or ever went to the foot of one, for though not 
 wholly indifferent to Nature, he loved to see her 
 framed in a window. He actually has the audacity, 
 in a note to his fifty-ninth chapter, to sneer at St. 
 Bernard because that true lover of nature on one 
 occasion, either because his joy in the external 
 world at times interfered with his devotions, or, 
 as I think, because he was bored by the vulgar 
 rhapsodies of his monkish companions, abstained 
 from looking at the lake of Geneva. Gibbon's note 
 is characteristic : " To admire or despise St. Ber- 
 nard as he ought, the reader should have before 
 the windows of his library the beauty of that 
 incomparable landscape." St. Bernard was to 
 Gibbon, as Wordsworth to Pope, 
 
 A forest seer, 
 A minstrel of the natural year, 
 A lover true, who knew by heart 
 Each joy the mountain dales impart. 
 I P
 
 226 EDWARD GIBBON 
 
 He was proud to confess that whatever knowledge 
 he had of the Scriptures he had acquired chiefly in 
 the woods and the fields, and that beeches and oaks 
 had been his best teachers of the Word of God. 
 One cannot fancy Gibbon in a forest. But if 
 Gibbon had not been fonder of the library than 
 of the lake, though he might have known more 
 than he did of " moral evil and of good," he would 
 hardly have been the author he was. 
 
 But the Decline and Fall was threatened from a 
 quarter more likely to prove dangerous than the 
 " incomparable landscape." On September loth, 
 1774, Gibbon writes: 
 
 Yesterday morning about half-past seven, as I was des- 
 troying an army of barbarians, I heard a double rap at the 
 door and my friend Mr. Eliot was soon introduced. After 
 some idle conversation he told me that if I was desirous of 
 being in Parliament he had an independent seat, very much 
 at my service. This is a fine prospect opening upon me, and 
 if next spring I should take my seat and publish my book — 
 (he meant the first volume only) — it will be a very memorable 
 era in my life. I am ignorant whether my borough will be 
 Liskeard or St. Germains. 
 
 Mr. Ehot controlled four boroughs, and it was 
 Liskeard that became Gibbon's, and for ten years, 
 though not always for Liskeard, he sat in Parlia- 
 ment. Ten most eventful years they were too, 
 both in our national and parliamentary history. 
 This might have been not an episode, but a catas- 
 trophe. Mr. Eliot's untimely entrance might not 
 merely have postponed the destruction of a horde 
 of barbarians, but have destroyed the history itself. 
 However, Mr. Gibbon never opened his mouth in 
 the House of Commons; " I assisted," says he, in 
 his magnificent way, " at " (mark the preposition) 
 " at the debates of a free assembly," that is, he
 
 EDWARD GIBBON 227 
 
 supported Lord North. He was not from the first 
 content to be a mute; he prepared a speech and 
 almost made up his mind to catch Sir Fletcher 
 Norton's eye. The subject, no mean one, was to 
 be the American war; but his courage oozed away, 
 he did not rise in his place. A month after he writes 
 from Boodle's: "I am still a mute; it is more 
 tremendous than I imagined; the great speakers 
 fill me with despair, the bad ones with terror." In 
 1779 his silent assistance was rewarded with a seat 
 at the Board of Trade, and a salary of between 
 seven and eight hundred a year. Readers of 
 Burke's great speech on Economical Reform will 
 remember the twenty minutes he devoted to this 
 marvellous Board of Trade, with its perpetual 
 virtual adjournment and unbroken sitting vaca- 
 tion. Such was Gibbon's passion for style that he 
 listened to the speech with dehght, and gives us 
 the valuable assurance that it was spoken just as 
 it reads, and that nobody enjoyed either hearing 
 or reading it more than he did. What a blessing it 
 is to have a good temper! But Gibbon's consti- 
 tuency did not approve of his becoming a minister's 
 man, and he lost his seat at the general election of 
 1783. " Mr. Eliot," this is Gibbon's account of it, 
 " Mr. Eliot was now deeply engaged in the measures 
 of opposition, and the electors of Liskeard are com- 
 monly of the same opinion as Mr. Eliot." Lord 
 North found him another seat, and for a short 
 time he sat in the new Parliament for the impor- 
 tant seaport of Lymington, but his office being 
 abolished in 1784, he bade Parliament and England 
 farewell, and, taking his Hbrary with him, departed 
 for Lausanne to conclude his history.
 
 228 EDWARD GIBBON 
 
 Gibbon, after completing his history, entertained 
 notions of writing other books, but, as a matter of 
 fact, he had but one thing left him to do in order to 
 discharge his duty to the universe. He had written 
 a magnificent history of the Roman Empire. It 
 remained to write the history of the historian. 
 Accordingly we have the Autobiography. These 
 two immortal works act and react upon one 
 another; the History sends us to the Autobio- 
 graphy, and the Autobiography returns us to 
 the History. 
 
 The style of the Autobiography is better than 
 that of the History. The awful word " verbose " 
 has been launched against certain pages of the 
 History by a critic, formidable and friendly — the 
 great Porson. There is not a superfluous word 
 in the Autobiography. The fact is, in this matter 
 of style, Gibbon took a great deal more pains 
 with himself than he did with the empire. He 
 sent the History, except the first volume, straight 
 to his printer fiom his first rough copy. He made 
 six different sketches of the Autobiography. It 
 is a most studied performance, and may be boldly 
 pronounced perfect. Not to know it almost by 
 heart is to deny yourself a great and wholly 
 innocent pleasure. Of the History it is permis- 
 sible to say with Mr. Silas Wegg, " I haven't been, 
 not to say right slap through him very lately, 
 having been otherwise employed, Mr. Boffin "; but 
 the Autobiography is no more than a good-sized 
 pamphlet. It has had the reward of shortness. It 
 is not only our best, but our best known auto- 
 biography. Almost its first sentence is about the 
 style it is to be in : " The style shall be simple and
 
 EDWARD GIBBON 229 
 
 familiar, but style is the image of character, and 
 the habits of correct writing may produce without 
 labour or design the appearance of art and study." 
 There is nothing artless or unstudied about the 
 Autobiography, but is it not sometimes a relief to 
 exchange the quips and cranks of some of our 
 modern writers, whose humour it is to be as it 
 were for ever slapping their readers in the face or 
 grinning at them from unexpected corners, for the 
 stately roll of the Gibbonian sentence ? The style 
 settled, he proceeds to say something about the 
 pride of race, but the pride of letters soon conquers 
 it, and as we glance down the page we see advancing 
 to meet us, curling its head, as Shakespeare says of 
 billows in a storm, the god-like sentence which 
 makes it for ever certain, not indeed that there will 
 never be a better novel than Tom Jones, for that 
 I suppose is still just possible, but that no novel 
 can ever receive so magnificent a compliment. The 
 sentence is well known but irresistible. 
 
 Our immortal Fielding was of the younger branch of the 
 Earls of Denbigh, who draw their origin from the Counts of 
 Hapsburg. Far different have been the fortunes of the English 
 and German divisions of the family. The former, the knights 
 and sheriffs of Leicestershire, have slowly risen to the dignity 
 of a peerage, the latter, the Emperors of Germany and Kings 
 of Spain, have threatened the liberty of the old and invaded 
 the treasures of the new world. The successors of Charles the 
 Fifth may disdain their brethren of England, but the romance 
 of Tom Jones, that exquisite picture oi human manners, will 
 outlive the Palace of the Escurial and the imperial eagle of 
 the House of Austria. 
 
 Well might Thackeray exclaim in his lecture on 
 Fielding, " There can be no gainsaying the sentence 
 of this great judge. To have your name mentioned 
 by Gibbon is like having it written on the dome of
 
 230 EDWARD GIBBON 
 
 St. Peter's. Pilgrims from all the world admire 
 and behold it." 
 
 After all this preliminary magnificence Gibbon 
 condescends to approach his own pedigree. There 
 was not much to tell, and the little there was he 
 did not know. A man of letters whose memory is 
 respected by all lovers of old books and Eliza- 
 bethan lyrics, Sir Egerton Brydges, was a cousin 
 of Gibbon's, and as genealogies were this unfor- 
 tunate man's consuming passion, he of course knew 
 all that Gibbon ought to have known about the 
 family, and speaks with a herald's contempt of the 
 historian's perfunctory investigations. " It is a 
 very unaccountable thing," says Sir Egerton, " that 
 Gibbon was so ignorant of the immediate branch of 
 the family whence he sprang"; but the truth is 
 that Gibbon was far prouder of his Palace of the 
 Escurial and his imperial eagle of the House of 
 Austria than of his family tree, which was indeed 
 of the most ordinary hedge-row description. His 
 grandfather was a South Sea director, and when 
 the bubble burst he was compelled by Act of 
 Parliament to disclose on oath his whole fortune. 
 He returned it at £106,543 5s. 6d., exclusive of 
 antecedent settlements. It was all confiscated, and 
 then £10,000 was voted the poor man to begin 
 again upon. Such bold oppression, says the grand- 
 son, can scarcely be shielded by the omnipotence 
 of Parliament. The old man did not keep his 
 £10,000 in a napkin, and speedily began, as his 
 grandson puts it, to erect on the ruins of the old, 
 the ediiice of a new fortune. The ruins must, I 
 think, have been more spacious than the affidavit 
 would suggest, for when only sixteen years after-
 
 EDWARD GIBBON 231 
 
 wards the elder Gibbon died, he was found to 
 be possessed of considerable property in Sussex, 
 Hampshire, Buckinghamshire, and the New River 
 Company, as well as of a spacious house with 
 gardens and grounds at Putney. A fractional 
 share of this inheritance secured to our historian 
 the liberty of action so necessary for the accom- 
 plishment of his great design. Large fortunes 
 have their uses. Mr. Milton, the scrivener, Mr. 
 Gibbon, the South Sea director, and Dr. Darwin 
 of Shrewsbury, had respectively something to do 
 with Paradise Lost, the Decline and Fall, and the 
 Origin of Species. 
 
 The most, indeed the only, interesting fact about 
 the Gibbon entourage is that the greatest of English 
 mystics, William Law, the inimitable author of A 
 Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, adapted to 
 the State and Conditions of all Orders of Christians, 
 was long tutor to the historian's father, and in 
 that capacity accompanied the future historian to 
 Emanuel College, Cambridge, and was afterwards, 
 and till the end of his days, spiritual director 
 to Miss Hester Gibbon, the historian's eccentric 
 maiden aunt. 
 
 It is an unpleasing impertinence for anyone to 
 assume that nobody save himself reads any par- 
 ticular book. I read with astonishment the other 
 day that Sir Humphry Davy's Consolations in 
 Travel; or, The Closing Days of a Philosopher'' s 
 Life, was a curious and totally forgotten work. 
 It is, however, always safe to say of a good book 
 that it is not read as much as it ought to be, and 
 of Law's Serious Call you may add, " or as much 
 as it used to be." It is a book with a strange and
 
 232 EDWARD GIBBON 
 
 moving spiritual pedigree. Dr. Johnson, one re- 
 members, took it up carelessly at Oxford, expecting 
 to find it a dull book, " as " (the words are his, 
 not mine) " such books generally are " ; but, he 
 proceeds, " I found Law an overmatch for me, 
 and this was the first occasion of my thinking 
 in earnest." George Whitefield writes, " Soon after 
 my coming up to the university, seeing a small 
 edition of Mr. Law's Serious Call in a friend's 
 hand, I soon purchased it. God worked power- 
 fully upon my soul by that excellent treatise." 
 The celebrated Thomas Scott, of Aston Sandford, 
 with the confidence of his school, dates the begin- 
 ning of his spiritual life from the hour when he 
 " carelessly," as he says, " took up Mr. Law's 
 Serious Call, a book I had hitherto treated with con- 
 tempt." When we remember how Newman in his 
 Apologia speaks of Thomas Scott as the writer " to 
 whom, humanly speaking, I almost owe my soul," 
 we become lost amidst a mazy dance of strange, 
 spectral influences which flit about the centuries 
 and make us what we are. Splendid achievement 
 though the History of the Decline and Fall may be, 
 glorious monument though it is, more lasting than 
 brass, of learning and industry, yet in sundry 
 moods it seems but a poor and barren thing by 
 the side of a book which, like Law's Serious Call, 
 has proved its power 
 
 To pierce the heart and tame the will. 
 
 But I must put the curb on my enthusiasm, or 
 I shall find myself re-echoing the sentiment of a 
 once celebrated divine who brought down Exeter 
 Hall by proclaiming, at the top of his voice, that
 
 EDWARD GIBBON 233 
 
 he would sooner be the author of The Washer^ 
 woman on Salisbury Plain than of Paradise Lost. 
 
 But Law's Serious Call, to do it only bare hterary 
 justice, is a great deal more like Paradise Lost than 
 The Washerwoman on Salisbury Plain, and deserves 
 better treatment at the hands of religious people 
 than to be reprinted, as it too often is, in a miser- 
 able, truncated, witless form which would never 
 have succeeded in arresting the wandering atten- 
 tion of Johnson or in saving the soul of Thomas 
 Scott. The motto of all books of original genius is : 
 
 Love me or leave me alone. 
 
 Gibbon read Law's Serious Call, but it left him 
 where it found him. " Had not," so he writes, 
 " Law's vigorous mind been clouded by enthusiasm, 
 he might be ranked with the most agreeable and 
 ingenious writers of his time." 
 
 Upon the death of Law in 1761, it is sad to have 
 to state that Miss Hester Gibbon cast aside the 
 severe rule of female dress which he had ex- 
 pounded in his Serious Call, and she had practised 
 for sixty years of her life. She now appeared like 
 Malvolio, resplendent in yellow stockings. Still, 
 it was something to have kept the good lady's feet 
 from straying into such evil garments for so long. 
 Miss Gibbon had a comfortable estate; and our 
 historian, as her nearest male relative, kept his eye 
 upon the reversion. The fifteenth and sixteenth 
 chapters had created a coolness, but he addressed 
 her a letter in which he assured her that, allowing 
 for differences of expression, he had the satisfac- 
 tion of feeling that practically he and she thought 
 alike on the great subject of religion. Whether she
 
 234 EDWARD GIBBON 
 
 believed him or not I cannot say; but she left him 
 her estate in Sussex. I must stop a moment to 
 consider the hard and far different fate of Porson. 
 Gibbon had taken occasion to refer to the seventh 
 verse of the fifth chapter of the First Epistle of 
 St. John as spurious. It has now disappeared 
 from our Bibles, without leaving a trace even in 
 the margin. So judicious a writer as Dean Alford 
 long ago, in his Greek Testament, observed, " There 
 is not a shadow of a reason for supposing it genuine," 
 An archdeacon of Gibbon's period thought other- 
 wise, and asserted the genuineness of the text, 
 whereupon Porson wrote a book and proved it 
 to be no portion of the inspired text. On this a 
 female relative who had Porson down in her will 
 for a comfortable annuity of ^£300, revoked that 
 part of her testamentary disposition, and sub- 
 stituted a paltry bequest of £30: " for," said she, 
 " I hear he has been writing against the Holy 
 Scriptures." As Porson only got £16 for writing 
 the book, it certainly cost him dear. But the 
 book remains a monument of his learning and 
 wit. The last quarter of the annuity must long 
 since have been paid. 
 
 Gibbon, the only one of a family of five who 
 managed to grow up at all, had no school life; for 
 though a short time at Westminster, his feeble 
 health prevented regularity of attendance. His 
 father never won his respect, nor his mother (who 
 died when he was ten) his affection. " I am 
 tempted," he says, " to enter my protest against 
 the trite and lavish praise of the happiness of 
 our boyish years which is echoed with so much 
 affectation in the world. That happiness I have
 
 EDWARD GIBBON 235 
 
 never known." Upon which passage Sainte-Beuve 
 characteristically remarks " that it is those who 
 have been deprived of a mother's solicitude, of 
 the down and flower of tender affection, of the 
 vague yet penetrating charm of dawning im- 
 pressions, who are most easily denuded of the 
 sentiment of reHgion." 
 
 Gibbon was, however, born free of the " fair 
 brotherhood " Macaulay so exquisitely described 
 in his famous poem, written after the Edinburgh 
 election. Reading became his sole employment. 
 He enjoyed all the advantages of the most irregular 
 of educations, and in his fifteenth year arrived at 
 Oxford, to use his celebrated words, though for 
 that matter almost every word in the Autobiography 
 is celebrated, with a stock of erudition that might 
 have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance 
 of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed 
 — for example, he did not know the Greek alphabet, 
 nor is there any reason to suppose that he would 
 have been taught it at Oxford. 
 
 I do not propose to refer to what he says about 
 his university. I hate giving pain, besides which 
 there have been new statutes since 1752. In 
 Gibbon's time there were no public examinations 
 at all, and no class-lists — a Saturnian reign which 
 I understand it is now sought to restore. Had 
 Gibbon followed his father's example and gone to 
 Cambridge, he would have found the Mathematical 
 Tripos fairly started on its beneficent career, and 
 might have taken as good a place in it as Dr. Dodd 
 had just done, a divine who is still year after year 
 referred to in the University Calendar as the author 
 of Thoughts in Prison, the circumstance that the
 
 236 EDWARD GIBBON 
 
 thinker was later on taken from prison, and hung 
 by the neck until he was dead, being no less 
 wisely than kindly omitted from a publication, 
 one of the objects of which is to inspire youth 
 with confidence that the path of mathematics is 
 the way to glory. 
 
 On his profession of Catholicism, Gibbon, ipso 
 facto, ceased to be a member of the university, and 
 his father, with a sudden accession of good sense, 
 packed off the young pervert, who at that time 
 had a very big head and a very small body, and 
 was just as full of controversial theology as he 
 could hold, to a Protestant pastor's at Lausanne, 
 where in an uncomfortable house, with an ill- 
 supplied table and a scarcity of pocket-money, 
 the ex-fellow-commoner of Magdalen was con- 
 demned to live from his sixteenth to his twenty- 
 first year. His time was mainly spent in reading. 
 Here he learnt Greek; here also he fell in love 
 with Mademoiselle Curchod. In the spring of 1758 
 he came home. He was at first very shy, and 
 went out but little, pursuing his studies even 
 in lodgings in Bond Street. But he was shortly 
 to be shaken out of his dumps, and made an 
 Englishman and a soldier. 
 
 If anything could provoke Gibbon's placid shade, 
 it would be the light and airy way his military 
 experiences are often spoken of, as if, like a modern 
 volunteer, he had but attended an Easter Monday 
 review. I do not believe the history of literature 
 affords an equally striking example of self-sacrifice. 
 He was the most sedentary of men. He hated 
 exercise, and rarely took any. Once after spending 
 some weeks in the summer at Lord Sheffield's
 
 EDWARD GIBBON 237 
 
 country place, when about to go, his hat was miss- 
 ing. " When," he was asked, " did you last see 
 it ? " " On my arrival," he repHed. " I left it on 
 the hall-table; I have had no occasion for it since." 
 Lord Sheffield's guests always knew that they 
 would find Mr. Gibbon in the library and meet 
 him at the dinner-table. He abhorred a horse. 
 His one vocation, and his only avocation, was 
 reading, not lazy glancing and skipping, but down- 
 right savage reading — geography, chronology, and 
 all the tougher sides of history. What glorious, 
 what martial times, indeed, must those have been 
 that made Mr. Gibbon leap into the saddle, desert 
 his books, and for two mortal years and a half live 
 in camps! He was two months at Blandford, three 
 months at Cranbrook, six months at Dover, four 
 months at Devizes, as many at Salisbury, and six 
 more at Southampton, where the troops were dis- 
 banded. During all this time Captain Gibbon was 
 energetically employed. He dictated the orders 
 and exercised the battalion. It did him a world 
 of good. What a pity Carlyle could not have been 
 subjected to the same discipline! The cessation, 
 too, of his habit of continued reading gave him 
 time for a little thinking, and when he returned 
 to his father's house, in Hampshire, he had become 
 fixed in his determination to write a history, though 
 of what was still undecided. 
 
 I am rather afraid to say it, for no two men 
 could well be more unlike one another, but Gibbon 
 always reminds me in an odd inverted way of 
 Milton. I suppose it is because as the one is our 
 grandest author, so the other is our most grandiose. 
 Both are self-conscious and make no apology — -
 
 238 EDWARD GIBBON 
 
 Milton magnificently self-conscious, Gibbon splen- 
 didly so. Everyone knows the great passages in 
 which Milton, in 1642, asked the readers of his 
 pamphlet on The Reason of Church Government 
 Urged against Prelacy, to go on trust with him for 
 some years for his great unwritten poem, as " being 
 a work not to be raised from the heat of youth or 
 the vapour of wine, like that which flows at waste 
 from the pen of some vulgar amorist or the trencher 
 fury of a rhyming parasite, nor to be obtained by 
 the invocation of Dame Memory and her seven 
 daughters, but by devout prayer to that Eternal 
 Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and know- 
 ledge, and sends out His seraphim with the hallow'd 
 fire of His Altar to touch and purify the lips of 
 whom He pleases: to this must be added indus- 
 trious and select reading, study, observation and 
 insight into all seemly opinions, arts, and affairs." 
 Different men, different minds. There are things 
 terrestrial as well as things celestial. Certainly 
 Gibbon's Autobiography contains no passages like 
 those which are to be found in Milton's pamphlets; 
 but for all that he, in his mundane way, conse- 
 crated himself for his self-imposed task, and spared 
 no toil to equip himself for it. He, too, no less than 
 Milton, had his high hope and his hard attempting. 
 He tells us in his stateliest way how he first thought 
 of one subject and then another, and what progress 
 he had made in his different schemes before he 
 abandoned them, and what reasons induced him 
 so to do. Providence watched over the future 
 historian of the Roman Empire as surely as it 
 did over the future author of Paradise Lost, as 
 surely as it does over everyone who has it in him
 
 EDWARD GIBBON 239 
 
 to do anything really great. Milton, we know, in 
 early life was enamoured of King Arthur, and had 
 it in his mind to make that blameless king the hero 
 of his promised epic, but 
 
 What resounds 
 In fable or romance of Uther's son. 
 Begirt with British and Armoric knights, 
 
 can brook a moment's comparison with the baffled 
 hero of Paradise Lost', so, too, what a mercy that 
 Gibbon did not fritter away his splendid energy, 
 as he once contemplated doing, on Sir Walter 
 Raleigh, or squander his talents on a history of 
 Switzerland or even of Florence! 
 
 After the disbanding of the mihtia Gibbon ob- 
 tained his father's consent to spend the money 
 it was originally proposed to lay out in buying 
 him a seat in Parliament, upon foreign travel, and 
 early in 1763 he reached Paris, where he abode 
 three months. An accomplished scholar, whose 
 too early death all who knew him can never cease 
 to deplore, Mr. Cotter Morison, whose sketch of 
 Gibbon is, by general consent, admitted to be one 
 of the most valuable books of a delightful series, 
 does his best, with but partial success, to conceal 
 his annoyance at Gibbon's stupidly placid enjoy- 
 ment of Paris and French cookery. " He does not 
 seem to be aware," says Mr. Morison, " that he 
 was witnessing one of the most singular social 
 phases which have ever yet been presented in the 
 history of man." Mr. Morison does not, indeed, 
 blame Gibbon for this, but having, as he had, the 
 most intimate acquaintance with this period of 
 French history, and knowing the tremendous issues 
 involved in it, he could not but be chagrined to
 
 240 EDWARD GIBBON 
 
 notice how Gibbon remained callous and im- 
 pervious. And, indeed, when the Revolution 
 came it took no one more by surprise than it did 
 the man who had written the Decline and Fall of 
 the Roman Empire. Writing, in 1792, to Lord 
 Sheffield, Gibbon says, " Remember the proud 
 fabric of the French monarchy: not four years 
 ago it stood founded, and might it not seem on 
 the rock of time, force, and opinion, supported 
 by the triple authority of the Church, the Nobility, 
 and the Parliament ? " But the Revolution came 
 for all that; and what, when it did come, did it 
 teach Mr. Gibbon ? " Do not, I beseech you, 
 tamper with parliamentary representation. If you 
 begin to improve the Constitution, you may be 
 driven step by step from the disfranchisement of 
 Old Sarum to the King in Newgate; the Lords 
 voted useless, the bishops abolished, the House of 
 Commons sans culottes.''^ The importance of shut- 
 ting off the steam and sitting on the safety-valve 
 was what the French Revolution taught Mr. 
 Gibbon. Mr. Bagehot says : " Gibbon's horror 
 of the French Revolution was derived from the 
 fact that he had arrived at the conclusion that he 
 was the sort of person a populace invariably kills." 
 An excellent reason, in my opinion, for hating 
 revolution, but not for misunderstanding it. 
 
 After leaving Paris Gibbon lived nearly a year 
 in Lausanne, reading hard to prepare himself for 
 Italy. He made his own handbook. At last he 
 felt himself fit to cross the Alps, which he did 
 seated in an osier basket planted on a man's 
 shoulders. He did not envy Hannibal his elephant. 
 He lingered four months in Florence, and then
 
 EDWARD GIBBON 241 
 
 entered Rome in a spirit of the most genuine and 
 romantic enthusiasm. His zeal made him positively 
 active, though it is impossible to resist a smile at 
 the picture he draws of himself " treading with a 
 lofty step the ruins of the Forum." He was in 
 Rome eighteen weeks; there he had, as we saw 
 at the beginning, his heavenly vision, to which he 
 was not disobedient. He paid a visit of six weeks' 
 duration to Naples, and then returned home more 
 rapidly. " The spectacle of Venice," he says, 
 " afforded some hours of astonishment." Gibbon 
 has sometimes been called " long-winded," but 
 when he chooses nobody can be shorter with either 
 a city or a century. 
 
 He returned to England in 1765, and for five 
 rather dull years lived in his father's house in the 
 country or in London lodgings. In 1770 his father 
 died, and in 1772 Gibbon took a house in Bentinck 
 Street, Manchester Square, filled it with books — 
 for in those days it must not be forgotten there 
 was no public library of any kind in London — and 
 worked hard at his first volume, which appeared 
 in February, 1775. It made him famous, also 
 infamous, since it concluded with the fifteenth and 
 sixteenth chapters on Christianity. In 1781 two 
 more volumes appeared. In 1783 he gave up 
 Parliament and London, and rolled over West- 
 minster Bridge in a postchaise, on his way to 
 Lausanne, where he had his home for the rest of 
 his days. In May, 1788, the three last volumes 
 appeared. He died in St. James's Street whilst 
 on a visit to London, on the 15th of January, 1794, 
 of a complaint of a most pronounced character, 
 which he had with characteristic and almost
 
 242 EDWARD GIBBON 
 
 criminal indolence totally neglected for thirty 
 years. He was buried in Fletching Churchyard, 
 Sussex, in the family burial-place of his faithful 
 friend and model editor, the first Lord Sheffield. 
 He had not completed his fifty-eighth year. 
 
 Before concluding with a few very humble ob- 
 servations on Gibbon's writings, something ought 
 to be said about him as a social being. In this 
 aspect he had distinguished merit, though his 
 fondness of and fitness for society came late. He 
 had no school-days, no college days, no gilded 
 youth. From sixteen to twenty-one he lived poorly 
 in Lausanne, and came home more Swiss than 
 English. Nor was his father of any use to him. It 
 took him a long time to rub off his shyness; but 
 the militia, Paris, and Rome, and, above all, the 
 proud consciousness of a noble design, made a 
 man of him, and after 1772 he became a well- 
 known figure in London society. He was a man 
 of fashion as well as of letters. In this respect, 
 and, indeed, in all others, except their common 
 love of learning, he differed from Dr. Johnson. 
 Lords and ladies, remarked that high authority, 
 don't like having their mouths shut. Gibbon never 
 shut anybody's mouth, and in Johnson's presence 
 rarely opened his own. Johnson's dislike of Gibbon 
 does not seem to have been based upon his heter- 
 odoxy, but his ugliness. " He is such an amazing 
 ugly fellow," said that Adonis. Boswell follows 
 suit, and, with still less claim to be critical, com- 
 plains loudly of Gibbon's ugliness. He also hated 
 him very sincerely. " The fellow poisons the whole 
 club to me," he cries. I feel sorry for Boswell, who
 
 EDWARD GIBBON 243 
 
 has deserved well of the human race. Ironical 
 people hke Gibbon are rarely tolerant of briUiant 
 folly. Gibbon, no doubt, was ugly. We get a glance 
 at him in one of Horace Walpole's letters, which, 
 sparkhng as it does with vanity, spite, and humour, 
 is always pleasant. He is writing to Mr. Mason: 
 
 " You will be diverted to hear that Mr. Gibbon 
 has quarrelled with me. He lent me his second 
 volume in the middle of November; I returned it 
 with a most civil panegyric. He came for more 
 incense. I gave it, but, alas! with too much sin- 
 cerity; I added: 'Mr. Gibbon, I am sorry you 
 should have pitched on so disgusting a subject 
 as the Constantinopolitan history. There is so 
 much of the Arians and Eunomians and semi- 
 Pelagians; and there is such a strange contrast 
 between Roman and Gothic manners, that, though 
 you have written the story as well as it could be 
 written, I fear few will have patience to read it.' 
 He coloured, all his round features squeezed them- 
 selves into sharp angles ; he screwed up his button- 
 mouth, and rapping his snuff-box, said, * It had 
 never been put together before ' — so well he meant 
 to add, but gulped it. He meant so well^ certainly, 
 for Tillemont, whom he quotes in every page, has 
 done the very thing. Well, from that hour to this, 
 I have never seen him, though he used to call once 
 or twice a week; nor has he sent me the third 
 volume, as he promised. I well knew his vanity, even 
 about his ridiculous face and person, but thought 
 he had too much sense to avow it so palpably." 
 " So much," adds Walpole, with sublime nescience 
 of the verdict of posterity upon his own most amus- 
 ing self, " so much for literature and its fops."
 
 244 EDWARD GIBBON 
 
 Male ugliness is an endearing qualit}% and in a 
 man of great talents it assists his reputation. It 
 mollifies our inferiority to be able to add to our 
 honest admiration of anyone's great intellectual 
 merit, " But did you ever see such a chin! " 
 
 Nobody except Johnson, who was morbid on the 
 subject of looks, liked Gibbon the less for having 
 a button-mouth and a ridiculous nose. He was, 
 Johnson and Boswell apart, a popular member of 
 the club. Sir Joshua and he were, in particular, 
 great cronies, and went about to all kinds of places, 
 and mixed in every sort of society. In May, June, 
 and July, 1779, Gibbon sat for his picture — that 
 famous portrait to be found at the beginning of 
 every edition of the History. Sir Joshua notes in his 
 Diary: " No new sitters — hard at work re-painting 
 the Nativity^ and busy with sittings of Gibbon." 
 
 If we are to believe contemporary gossip, this 
 was not the first time Reynolds had depicted the 
 historian. Some years earlier the great painter 
 had executed a celebrated portrait of Dr. Beattie, 
 still pleasingly remembered by the lovers of old- 
 fashioned poetry as the poet of ^he Minstrel, but 
 who, in 1773, was better known as the author of 
 an Essay on Truth. This personage, who in later 
 life, it is melancholy to relate, took to drinking, 
 is represented in Reynolds's picture in his Oxford 
 gown of Doctor of Laws, with his famous essay 
 under his arm, while beside him is Truth, habited 
 as an angel, holding in one hand a pair of scales, 
 and with the other thrusting down three frightful 
 figures emblematic of Sophistry, Scepticism, and 
 Infidelity. That Voltaire and Hume stood for two 
 of these figures was no secret, but it was whispered
 
 EDWARD GIBBON 245 
 
 Gibbon was the third. Even if so, an incident so 
 trifling was not likely to ruffle the composure, or 
 prevent the intimacy, of two such good-tempered 
 men as Reynolds and Gibbon. The latter was 
 immensely proud of Reynolds's portrait — the 
 authorised portrait, of course — the one for which 
 he had paid. He had it hanging up in his library 
 at Lausanne, and, if we may believe Charles Fox, 
 was fonder of looking at it than out of the window 
 upon that incomparable landscape, with indifference 
 to which he had twitted St. Bernard. 
 
 But, as I have said, Gibbon was a man of fashion 
 as well as a man of letters. In another volume of 
 Walpole we have a glimpse of him playing a rubber 
 of whist. His opponents were Horace himself and 
 Lady Beck. His partner was a lady whom Walpole 
 irreverently calls the Archbishopess of Canterbury.^ 
 At Brooks's, White's, and Boodle's, Gibbon was 
 a prime favourite. His quiet manner, ironical 
 humour, and perpetual good temper made him 
 excellent company. He is, indeed, reported once, 
 at Brooks's, to have expressed a desire to see the 
 heads of Lord North and half-a-dozen ministers 
 on the table; but as this was only a few days 
 before he accepted a seat at the Board of Trade 
 at their hands, his wrath was evidently of the 
 kind that does not allow the sun to go down upon 
 it. His moods were usually mild : 
 
 Soon as to Brooks's thence thy footsteps bend, 
 WTiat gratulations thy approach attend I 
 See Gibbon rap his box, auspicious sign 
 That classic wit and comphment combine. 
 
 ' By which title he refers to Mrs. Cornwallis, a lively lady who 
 used to get her right reverend lord, himself a capital hand at whist, 
 into great trouble by persisting in giving routs on Sunday.
 
 246 EDWARD GIBBON 
 
 To praise Gibbon heartily, you must speak in 
 low tones. " His cheek," says Mr. Morison, " rarely 
 flushes in enthusiasm for a good cause." He was, 
 indeed, not obviously on the side of the angels. 
 But he was a dutiful son to a trying father, an 
 affectionate and thoughtful stepson to a stepmother 
 who survived him, and the most faithful and warm- 
 hearted of friends. In this article of friendship he 
 not only approaches, but reaches, the romantic. 
 While in his teens he made friends with a Swiss of 
 his own age. A quarter of a century later on, we 
 find the boyish companions chumming together 
 under the same roof at Lausanne, and delighting 
 in each other's society. His attachment to Lord 
 Sheffield is a beautiful thing. It is impossible to 
 read Gibbon's letters without responding to the 
 feeling which breathes through Lord Sheffield's 
 Preface to the Miscellaneous Writings: 
 
 The letters will prove how pleasant, friendly, and amiable 
 Mr. Gibbon was in private life; and if in publishing letters 
 so flattering to myself I incur the imputation of vanity, I 
 meet the charge with a frank confession that I am indeed 
 highly vain of having enjoyed for so many years the esteem, 
 the confidence, and the affection of a man whose social qualities 
 endeared him to the most accomplished society, whose talents, 
 great as they were, must be acknowledged to have been fully 
 equalled by the sincerity of his friendship. 
 
 To have been pleasant, friendly, amiable and 
 sincere in friendship, to have written the Decline 
 and Fall of the Roman Empire and the Auto- 
 biography, must be Gibbon's excuse for his 
 unflushing cheek. 
 
 To praise Gibbon is not wholly superfluous; to 
 commend his history would be so. Last May it 
 attained, as a whole, its hundredth year. Time 
 has not told upon it. It stands unaltered, and
 
 EDWARD GIBBON 247 
 
 with its authority unimpaired. It would be in- 
 vidious to name the histories it has seen born 
 and die. Its shortcomings have been pointed out 
 — it is well; its inequalities exposed — that is fair; 
 its style criticised — that is just. But it is still read. 
 " Whatever else is read," says Professor Freeman, 
 " Gibbon must be." 
 
 The tone he thought fit to adopt towards Chris- 
 tianity was, quite apart from all particular con- 
 siderations, a mistaken one. No man is big enough 
 to speak slightingly of the constructions his fellow- 
 men have from time to time put upon the Infinite. 
 And conduct which in a philosopher is ill-judged, 
 is in a historian ridiculous. Gibbon's sneers could 
 not alter the fact that his History, which he elected 
 to style the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 
 might equally well, as Dean Stanley has observed, 
 have been called the Rise and Progress of the 
 Christian Church. This tone of Gibbon's was the 
 more unfortunate because he was not of those men 
 who are by the order of their minds incapable of 
 theology. He was an admirable theologian, and, 
 even as it is, we have Cardinal Newman's authority 
 for the assertion that Gibbon is the only Church 
 historian worthy of the name who has written 
 in English. 
 
 Gibbon's love of the unseemly may also be depre- 
 cated. His is not the boisterous impropriety which 
 may sometimes be observed staggering across the 
 pages of Mr. Carlyle, but the more offensive variety 
 which is overheard sniggering in the notes. 
 
 The importance, the final value of Gibbon's 
 History has been assailed in high quarters. Cole- 
 ridge, in a well-known passage in his Table Talk —
 
 248 EDWARD GIBBON 
 
 too long to be quoted — said Gibbon was a man of 
 immense reading; but he had no philosophy. " I 
 protest," he adds, " I do not remember a single 
 philosophical attempt made throughout the work 
 to fathom the ultimate causes of the decline and 
 fall of the empire." This spoiled Gibbon for Cole- 
 ridge, who has told us that " though he had read 
 all the famous histories, and he believed some 
 history of every country or nation, that is or ever 
 existed, he had never done so for the story itself' — 
 the only thing interesting to him being the principles 
 to be evolved from and illustrated by the facts." 
 
 I am not going to insult the majestic though 
 thickly-veiled figure of the Philosophy of History. 
 Every sensible man, though he might blush to be 
 called a philosopher, must wish to be the wiser for 
 his reading; but it may, I think, be fairly said that 
 the first business of a historian is to tell his story, 
 nobly and splendidly, with vivacity and vigour. 
 Then I do not see why we children of a larger 
 growth may not be interested in the annals of 
 mankind simply as a story, without worrying every 
 moment to evolve principles from each part of it. 
 If I choose to be interested in the colour of Mary 
 Queen of Scots' eyes, or the authorship of the 
 Letters of Junius, I claim the right to be so. Of 
 course, if I imagine either of these subjects to be 
 matters of importance — if I devote my life to their 
 elucidation, if I bore my friends with presentation 
 pamphlets about them — why, then, I am either 
 a feeble fribble or an industrious fool; but if I do 
 none of these things I ought to be left in peace, and 
 not ridiculed by those who seem to regard the noble 
 stream of events much as Brindley did rivers —
 
 EDWARD GIBBON 249 
 
 mainly as something which fills their ugly canals 
 of dreary and frequently false comment. 
 
 But, thirdly, whilst yielding the first place to 
 philosophy, divine philosophy, as I suppose, when 
 one comes to die, one will be glad to have done, it 
 is desirable that the text and the comment should 
 be kept separate and apart. The historian who 
 loads his frail craft with that perilous and shifting 
 freight, philosophy, adds immensely to the dangers 
 of his voyage across the ocean of Time. Gibbon 
 was no fool, yet it is as certain as anything can be, 
 that had he put much of his philosophy into his 
 history, both would have gone to the bottom long 
 ago. For even better philosophy than Gibbon's 
 would have been is apt to grow mouldy in a 
 quarter of a century, and to need three new coats 
 of good oily rhetoric to make it presentable to 
 each new generation. 
 
 Gibbon was neither a great thinker nor a great 
 man. He had neither hght nor warmth. This is 
 what, doubtless, prompted Sir James Mackintosh's 
 famous exclamation, that you might scoop Gibbon's 
 mind out of Burke's without missing it. But hence, 
 I say, the fitness of things that chained Gibbon 
 to his Hbrary chair, and set him as his task to 
 write the history of the Roman Empire, whilst 
 leaving Burke at large to illuminate the problems 
 of his own time. 
 
 Gibbon avowedly wrote for fame. He built his 
 History meaning it to last. He got ;^6ooo for 
 writing it. The booksellers netted ^60,000 by 
 printing it. Gibbon did not mind. He knew it 
 would be the volumes of his History, and not the 
 banking books of his publishers, who no doubt ran
 
 250 EDWARD GIBBON 
 
 their trade risks, which would keep their place 
 upon men's shelves. He did an honest piece of 
 work, and he has had a noble reward. Had he 
 attempted to know the ultimate causes of the 
 decline and fall of the Roman Empire, he must 
 have failed, egregiously, childishly. He abated his 
 pretensions as a philosopher, was content to 
 attempt some picture of the thing acted — of the 
 great pageant of history — and succeeded.
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 
 1892 
 
 THE large and weighty family of Gradgrinds 
 may, from their various well-cushioned 
 coigns of advantage, give forcible utter- 
 ance to their opinions as to what are the really 
 important things in this life; but the fact remains, 
 distasteful as it may be to those of us who accom- 
 plish the disciplinary end of vexing our fathers' 
 souls by other means than '^ penning stanzas," 
 that the lives of poets, even of people who have 
 passed for poets, eclipse in general and permanent 
 interest the lives of other men. Whilst above the 
 sod, these poets were often miserable enough. But 
 charm hangs over their graves. The sternest 
 pedestrian, even he who is most bent on making 
 his inn by the precise path he has, with much study 
 of the map, previously prescribed for himself, will 
 yet often veer to the right or to the left to visit the 
 lonely churchyard where, as he hears by the way, 
 lie the ashes of some brother of the tuneful quill. 
 It may well be that this brother's verses are not 
 frequently on our lips. It is not the lot of every 
 bard to make quotations. It may sometimes 
 happen to you, as you stand mournfully surveying 
 the little heap, to rack your brains unavailingly for 
 so much as a single couplet; nay, so treacherous 
 is memory, the very title of his best-known poem 
 may, for the moment, have slipped you. But 
 
 251
 
 252 WILLIAM COWPER 
 
 your heart is melted all the same, and you feel it 
 would indeed have been a churlish thing to go on 
 your original way, unmindful of the fact that 
 
 In yonder grave a Druid lies ! 
 
 And you have your reward. When you have 
 reached your desired haven, and are sitting alone 
 after dinner in the coffee-room, neat-handed 
 Phyllis (were you not fresh from a poet's grave, 
 a homelier name might have served her turn) 
 having administered to your final wants, and 
 disappeared with a pretty flounce, the ruby- 
 coloured wine the dead poet loved, the bottled 
 sunshine of a bygone summer, glows the warmer 
 in your cup as you muse over minstrels now no 
 more, whether 
 
 Of mighty poets in their misery dead, 
 
 or of such a one as he whose neglected grave you 
 have just visited. 
 
 It was a pious act, you feel, to visit that grave. 
 You commend yourself for doing so. As the night 
 draws on, this very simple excursion down a rutty 
 lane and across a meadow begins to wear the hues 
 of devotion and of love; and unless you are very 
 stern with yourself, the chances are that by the 
 time you light your farthing dip, and are proceed- 
 ing on your dim and perilous way to your bedroom 
 at the end of a creaking passage, you will more 
 than half believe you were that poet's only unselfish 
 friend, and that he died saying so. 
 
 All this is due to the charm of poetry. Port has 
 nothing to do with it. Indeed, as a plain matter of 
 fact, who would drink port at a village inn ? Nobody 
 feels a bit like this after visiting the tombs of
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 253 
 
 soldiers, lawyers, statesmen, or divines. These 
 pompous places, viewed through the haze of one's 
 recollections of the " careers " of the men whose 
 names they vainly try to perpetuate, seem but, if 
 I may slightly alter some words of old Cowley's, 
 " An ill show after a sorry sight." 
 
 It would be quite impossible to enumerate one- 
 half of the reasons which make poets so interesting. 
 I will mention one, and then pass on to the subject- 
 matter. They often serve to tell you the age of 
 men and books. This is most interesting. There 
 is Mr. Matthew Arnold. How impossible it would 
 be to hazard even a wide solution of the problem 
 of his age, but for the way he has of writing about 
 Lord Byron ! Then we know. 
 
 The thought of Byron, of his cry 
 Stormily sweet, his Titan agony. 
 
 And again: 
 
 What boots it now that Byron bore, 
 
 With haughty scorn which mocked the smart. 
 
 Through Europe to the ^tolian shore. 
 The pageant of his bleeding heart ? 
 
 Ask any man born in the fifties, or even the later 
 forties, what he thinks of Byron's Titan agony, 
 and his features will probably wear a smile. Insist 
 upon his giving his opinion about the pageant of 
 the Childe's bleeding heart, and more likely than 
 not he will laugh outright.^ But, I repeat, how 
 interesting to be able to tell the age of one dis- 
 tinguished poet from his way of writing of another! 
 
 So, too, with books. Miss Austen's novels are 
 dateless things. Nobody in his senses would speak 
 of them as " old novels." John higlesant is an old 
 
 * But if the question were now to be put to a man born in the 
 nineties of the last century he will probably neither smile nor laugh.
 
 254 WILLIAM COWPER 
 
 novel, so is Ginx's Baby. But Emma is quite new, 
 and, like a wise woman, affords few clues as to 
 her age. But when, taking up Sense and Sensi- 
 bility, we read Marianne Dashwood's account of 
 her sister's lover — 
 
 " And besides all this, I am afraid, mamma, he 
 has no real taste. Music seems scarcely to attract 
 him, and though he admires Elinor's drawings 
 very much, it is not the admiration of a person 
 who can understand their worth. He admires as 
 a lover, and not as a connoisseur. Oh, mamma! 
 how spiritless, how tame was Edward's manner in 
 reading last night! I felt for my sister most 
 severely. I could hardly keep my seat to hear 
 those beautiful lines which have frequently almost 
 driven me wild, pronounced with such impene- 
 trable calmness, such dreadful indifference! " " He 
 would certainly " (says Mrs. Dashwood) " have 
 done more justice to simple and elegant prose. 
 I thought so, at the time, but you would give him 
 Cowper." " Nay, mamma, if he is not to be 
 animated by Cowper! " — when we read this, we 
 know pretty well when Miss Austen was born. It 
 is surely pleasant to be reminded of a time when 
 sentimental girls used Cowper as a test of a lover's 
 sensibility. One of our modern swains is no more 
 likely to be condemned as a Philistine for not 
 reading The Task with unction, than he is to be 
 hung for sheep-stealing, or whipped at the cart's 
 tail for speaking evil of constituted authorities; 
 but the position probably still has its perils, and 
 the Marianne Dashwoods of the hour are quite 
 capable of putting their admirers on to Rose Mary^ 
 or The Blessed Damosel and then flouting their
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 255 
 
 insensibility. The fact, of course, is, that each 
 generation has a way of its own, and poets are 
 interesting because they are the mirrors in which 
 their generation saw its own face; and what is 
 more, they are magic mirrors, since they retain 
 the power of reflecting the image long after what 
 was pleased to call itself the substance has dis- 
 appeared into thin air. 
 
 There is no more interesting poet than Cowper, 
 and hardly one the area of whose influence was 
 greater. No man, it is unnecessary to say, courted 
 popularity less, yet he threw a very wide net, and 
 caught a great shoal of readers. For twenty years 
 after the publication of The Task in 1785, his 
 general popularity never flagged, and even when 
 in the eyes of the world it was eclipsed, when 
 Cowper became, in the opinion of fierce Byronians 
 and moss-trooping Northerners, " a coddled Pope " 
 and a milksop, our great, sober, Puritan middle- 
 class took him to their warm firesides for two 
 generations more. Some amongst these were not, 
 it must be owned, lovers of poetry at all; they 
 liked Cowper because he is full of a peculiar kind 
 of religious phraseology, just as some of Burns's 
 countrymen love Burns because he is full of a 
 peculiar kind of strong drink called whisky. This 
 was bad taste; but it made Cowper all the more 
 interesting, as he thus became, by a kind of com- 
 pulsion, the favourite because the only poet of all 
 these people's children; and the children of the 
 righteous do not wither like the green herb, neither 
 do they beg their bread from door to door, but 
 they live in slated houses and are known to read 
 at times. No doubt, by the time it came to these
 
 256 WILLIAM COWPER 
 
 children's children the spell was broken, and Cowper 
 went out of fashion when Sunday travelling and 
 play-going came in again. But his was a long run, 
 and under peculiar conditions. Signs and tokens are 
 now abroad, whereby the judicious are beginning 
 to infer that there is a renewed disposition to read 
 Cowper and to love him, not for his faults, but for 
 his great merits, his observing eye, his playful wit, 
 his personal charm. 
 
 Hayley's Life of Cowper is now obsolete, though 
 since it is adorned with vignettes by Blake it is 
 prized by the curious. Hayley was a kind friend 
 to Cowper, but he possessed, in a highly developed 
 state, that aversion to the actual facts of a case 
 which is unhappily so characteristic of the British 
 biographer. Southey's Life is horribly long-winded 
 and stuffed out; still, like Homer's Iliad, it remains 
 the best. It was long excluded from strict circles 
 because of its worldly tone, and also because it 
 more than hinted that the Rev. John Newton was 
 to blame for his mode of treating the poet's delu- 
 sions. Its place was filled by the Rev. Mr. Grim- 
 shaw's Life of the poet, which is not a nice book. 
 Mr. Benham's recent Life, to be found in the cheap 
 Globe edition of Cowper^s Poems, is marvellously 
 good and compressed. Mr. Goldwin Smith's 
 account of the poet in Mr. Morley's series could 
 not fail to be interesting, though it created in the 
 minds of some readers a curious sensation of immense 
 distance from the object described. Mr. Smith 
 seemed to discern Cowper clearly enough, but as 
 somebody very far off. This, however, may be fancy. 
 
 The wise man will not trouble the biographers. 
 He will make for himself a short list of dates, so
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 257 
 
 that he may know where he is at any particular 
 time, and then, poking the fire and (his author 
 notwithstanding) lighting his pipe — 
 
 Oh, pernicious weed, whose scent the fair annoys — 
 
 he will read Cowper's letters. There are five 
 volumes of them in Southey's edition. It would 
 be to exaggerate to say you wish there were fifty, 
 but you are, at all events, well content there 
 should be five. In the course of them Cowper will 
 tell you the story of his own life, as it ought to be 
 told, as it alone can be told, in the purest of English 
 and with the sweetest of smiles. For a combination 
 of delightful qualities, Cowper's letters have no 
 rivals. They are playful, witty, loving, sensible, 
 ironical, and, above all, as easy as an old shoe. So 
 easy, indeed, that after you have read half a 
 volume or so, you begin to think their merits have 
 been exaggerated, and that anybody could write 
 letters as good as Cowper's. Even so the man who 
 never played billiards, and who sees Mr. Roberts 
 play that game, might hastily opine that he, too, 
 could go and do likewise. 
 
 To form anything like a fair estimate of Cowper, 
 it is wise to ignore as much as possible his mental 
 disease, and always to bear in mind the manner of 
 man he naturally was. He belonged essentially to 
 the order of wags. He was, it is easy to see, a lover 
 of trifling things, elegantly finished. He hated 
 noise, contention, and the public gaze, but society 
 he ever insisted upon. 
 
 I praise the Frenchman, his remark was shrewd — 
 How sweet, how passing sweet, is soUtude! 
 But grant me still a friend in my retreat. 
 Whom I may whisper — " Solitude is sweet." 
 I R
 
 258 WILLIAM COWPER 
 
 He loved a jest, a barrel of oysters and a bottle 
 of wine. His well-known riddle on a kiss is Cowper 
 from top to toe: 
 
 I am just two and two; I am warm, I am cold. 
 And the parent of numbers that cannot be told. 
 I am lawful, unlawful, a duty, a fault, 
 I am often sold dear, good for nothing when bought, 
 An extraordinary boon, and a matter of course. 
 And yielded with pleasure when taken by force. 
 
 Why, it is a perfect dictionary of kisses in six lines ! 
 Had Cowper not gone mad in his thirty-second 
 year, and been frightened out of the world of 
 trifles, we should have had another Prior, a wittier 
 Gay, an earlier Praed, an English La Fontaine. 
 We do better with The Task and the Lines to Mary^ 
 but he had a light touch. 
 
 'Tis not that I design to rob 
 
 Thee of thy birthright, gentle Bob, 
 
 For thou art born sole heir and single 
 
 Of dear Mat Prior's easy jingle. 
 
 Not that I mean while thus I knit 
 
 My threadbare sentiments together, 
 
 To show my genius or my wit. 
 
 When God and you know I have neither. 
 
 Or such as might be better shown 
 
 By letting poetry alone. 
 
 This lightness of touch, this love of trifling, 
 never deserted Cowper, not even when the pains 
 of hell gat hold of him, and he believed himself the 
 especially accursed of God. In 1791, when things 
 were very black, we find him writing to his good 
 Dissenting friend, the Rev. William Bull (" Claris- 
 sime Taurorum "), as follows: "Homer, I say, 
 has all my time, except a little that I give every 
 day to no very cheering prospects of futurity. I 
 would I were a Hottentot, or even a Dissenter, so 
 that my views of an hereafter were more comfort-
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 259 
 
 able. But such as I am, Hope, if it please God, may 
 visit even me. Should we ever meet again, possibly 
 we may part no more. Then, if Presbyterians ever 
 find their way to heaven, you and I may know 
 each other in that better world, and rejoice in the 
 recital of the terrible things that we endured in 
 this. I will wager sixpence with you now, that when 
 that day comes you shall acknowledge my story a 
 more wonderful one than yours ; only order your ex- 
 ecutors to put sixpence in your mouth when they bury 
 you, that you may have wherewithal to pay me." 
 
 Whilst living in the Temple, which he did for 
 twelve years, chiefly, it would appear, on his 
 capital, he associated with a race of men, of whom 
 report has reached us, called " wits." He belonged 
 to the Nonsense Club; he wrote articles for maga- 
 zines. He went to balls, to Brighton, to the play. 
 He went once, at all events, to the gallery of the 
 House of Commons, where he witnessed an alter- 
 cation between a placeman and an alderman — two 
 well-known types still in our midst. The placeman 
 had misquoted Terence, and the alderman had 
 corrected him; whereupon the ready placeman 
 thanked the worthy alderman for teaching him 
 Latin, and volunteered in exchange to teach the 
 alderman English. Cowper must at this time have 
 been a considerable reader, for all through life he 
 is to be found quoting his authors, poets, and 
 playwrights, with an easy appositeness, all the 
 more obviously genuine because he had no books 
 in the country to refer to. " I have no English 
 History," he writes, " except Baker's Chronicle, 
 and that I borrowed three years ago from Mr. 
 Throckmorton." This was wrong, but Baker's
 
 26o WILLIAM COWPER 
 
 Chronicle (Sir Roger de Coverley's favourite Sunday- 
 reading) is not a book to be returned in a month. 
 
 After this easy fashion Cowper acquired what 
 never left him — the style and manner of an 
 accomplished worldling. 
 
 The story of the poet's life does not need telling; 
 but as Owen Meredith says, probably not even for 
 the second time, " after all, old things are best." 
 Cowper was born in the rectory at Great Berk- 
 hampstead, in 1735. His mother dying when he 
 was six years old, he was despatched to a country 
 academy, where he was horribly bullied by one 
 of the boys, the reality of whose persecution is 
 proved by one terrible touch in his victim's account 
 of it: "I had such a dread of him, that I did not 
 dare lift my eyes to his face. I knew him best by 
 his shoe-buckle." The odious brute! Cowper goes 
 on to say he had forgiven him, which I can believe, 
 but when he proceeds to ejaculate a wish to meet 
 his persecutor again in heaven, doubt creeps in. 
 When ten years old he was sent to Westminster, 
 where there is nothing to show that he was other- 
 wise than fairly happy; he took to his classics 
 very kindly, and (so he says) excelled in cricket 
 and football. This is evidence, but as Dr. Johnson 
 once confessed about the evidence for the immor- 
 tality of the soul, " one would like more." He was 
 for some time in the class of Vincent Bourne, who, 
 though born in 1695, and a Fellow of Trinity 
 College, Cambridge, ranks high amongst the Latin 
 poets. Whether Cowper was bullied at Westminster 
 is a matter of controversy. Bourne was bullied. 
 About that there can be no doubt. Cowper loved 
 him, and relates with delight how on one occasion
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 261 
 
 the Duke of Richmond (Burke's Duke, I suppose) 
 set fire to the greasy locks of this latter-day 
 Catullus, and then, alarmed at the spread of the 
 conflagration, boxed his master's ears to put it 
 out. At eighteen Cowper left Westminster, and 
 after doing nothing (at which he greatly excelled) 
 for nine months in the country, returned to town, 
 and was articled to an attorney in Ely Place, 
 Holborn, for three years. At the same time, being 
 intended for the Bar, he was entered at the Middle, 
 though he subsequently migrated to the Inner 
 Temple. These three years in Ely Place Cowper 
 fribbled away agreeably enough. He had as his 
 desk-companion Edward Thurlow, the most tre- 
 mendous of men. Hard by Ely Place is Southamp- 
 ton Row, and in Southampton Row lived Ashley 
 Cowper, the poet's uncle, with a trio of affable 
 daughters, Theodora Jane, Harriet, afterwards 
 Lady Hesketh, and a third, who became the wife 
 of Sir Archer Croft. According to Cowper, a great 
 deal of giggling went on in Southampton Row. He 
 feU in love with Theodora, and Theodora fell in 
 love with him. He wrote her verses enough to fill 
 a volume. She was called Delia in his lays. In 
 1752, his articles having expired, he took chambers 
 in the Temple, and in 1754 was called to the Bar. 
 Ashley Cowper, a very little man, who used to 
 wear a white hat lined with yellow silk, and was 
 on that account likened by his nephew to a mush- 
 room, would not hear of his daughter marrying 
 her cousin; and being a determined little man, 
 he had his own way, and the lovers were parted 
 and saw one another no more. Theodora Cowper 
 wore the willow all the rest of her long life. Her
 
 262 WILLIAM COWPER 
 
 interest in her cousin never abated. Through her 
 sister, Lady Hesketh, she contributed in later years 
 generously to his support. He took the money and 
 knew where it came from, but they never wrote to 
 one another, nor does her name ever appear in 
 Cowper's correspondence. She became, so it is 
 said, morbid on the subject during her latter days, 
 and dying twenty-four years after her lover, she 
 bequeathed to a nephew a mysterious packet she 
 was known to cherish. It was found to contain 
 Cowper's love-verses. 
 
 In 1756 Cowper's father died, and the poet's 
 patrimony proved to be a very small one. He 
 was made a Commissioner of Bankrupts. The 
 salary was ^60 a year. He knew one solicitor, 
 but whether he ever had a brief is not known. He 
 lived alone in his chambers till 1763, when, under 
 well-known circumstances, he went raving mad, 
 and attempted to hang himself in his bedroom, 
 and very nearly succeeded. He was removed to 
 Dr. Cotton's asylum, where he remained a year. 
 This madness, which in its origin had no more to 
 do with religion than it had with the Binomial 
 Theorem, ultimately took the turn of believing that 
 it was the will of God that he should kill himself, and 
 that as he had failed to do so he was damned ever- 
 lastingly. In this faith, diversified by doubt, Cow- 
 per must be said henceforth to have lived and died. 
 
 On leaving St. Albans, the poet, in order to be 
 near his only brother, the Rev. John Cowper, 
 Fellow of Corpus, Cambridge, and a most delightful 
 man, had lodgings in Huntingdon; and there, one 
 eventful Tuesday in 1765, he made the acquain- 
 tance of Mary Unwin. Mrs. Unwin's husband,
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 263 
 
 a most scandalously non-resident clergyman — 
 whom, however, Cowper composedly calls a veri- 
 table Parson Adams — was living at this time, not 
 in his Norfolk rectory of Grimston, but contentedly 
 enough in Huntingdon, where he took pupils. 
 Cowper became a lodger in the family, which 
 consisted of the rector and his wife, a son at 
 Cambridge, and a daughter, also one or two pupils. 
 In 1767 Mr. Unwin was thrown from his horse and 
 fractured his skull. Church-reformers pointed out, 
 at the time, that had the Rector of Grimston been 
 resident, this accident could not have occurred in 
 Huntingdon. They then went on to say, but less 
 convincingly, that Mr. Unwin's death was the judg- 
 ment of Heaven upon him. Mr. Unwin dead, the 
 poet and the widow moved to Olney, where they 
 lived together for nineteen years in a tumble-down 
 house, and on very slender means. Their attraction 
 to Olney was in the fact that John Newton was 
 curate-in-charge. Olney was not an ideal place by 
 any means. Cowper and Mrs. Unwin lived in no 
 fools' paradise, for they visited the poor and knew 
 the manner of their lives. The inhabitants were 
 mostly engaged in lace-making and straw-plaiting; 
 they were miserably poor, immoral, and drunken. 
 There is no idyllic nonsense in Cowper's poetry. 
 
 In 1773 he had another most violent attack of 
 suicidal mania, and attempted his life more than 
 once. Writing in 1786 to Lady Hesketh, Cowper 
 gives her an account of his illness, of which at the 
 time she knew nothing, as her acquaintance with 
 her cousin was not renewed till 1785 : 
 
 Know then, that in the year '73, the same scene that was 
 acted at St. Albans opened upon me again at Olney, only
 
 264 WILLIAM COWPER 
 
 covered with a still deeper shade of melancholy, and ordained 
 to be of much longer duration. I believed that everybody 
 hated me, and that Mrs. Unwin hated me most of all; was 
 convinced that all my food was poisoned, together with ten 
 thousand megrims of the same stamp. Dr. Cotton was con- 
 sulted. He replied that he could do no more for me than 
 might be done at Olney, but recommended particular vigi- 
 lance, lest I should attempt my life; a caution for which 
 there was the greatest occasion. At the same time that I was 
 convinced of Mrs. Unwin's aversion to me, I could endure no 
 other companion. The whole management of me consequently 
 devolved upon her, and a terrible task she had; she per- 
 formed it, however, with a cheerfulness hardly ever equalled 
 on such an occasion, and I have often heard her say that if 
 ever she praised God in her life, it was when she found she 
 was to have all the labour. She performed it accordingly, 
 but as I hinted once before, very much to the hurt of her 
 own constitution. 
 
 Just before this outbreak, Cowper and Mrs. 
 Unwin had agreed to marry, but after it they felt 
 the subject was not to be approached, and so the 
 poor things spoke of it no more. Still, it was well 
 they had spoken out. " Love me, and tell me so," 
 is a wise maxim of behaviour. 
 
 Stupid people, themselves leading, one is glad to 
 beheve, far duller lives than Cowper and Mary 
 Unwin, have been known to make dull, ponderous 
 jokes about this menage at Olney — its country 
 walks, its hymn tunes, its religious exercises. But 
 it is pleasant to note how quick Sainte-Beuve, 
 whose three papers on Cowper are amongst the 
 glories of the Causeries du Lundi, is to recognise 
 how much happiness and pleasantness was to be 
 got out of this semi-monastic life and close social 
 relation. Cowper was indeed the very man for it. 
 One can apply to him his own well-known lines 
 about the winter season, and crown him 
 
 King of intimate delights. 
 Fireside enjoyments, homeborn happiness.
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 265 
 
 No doubt he went mad at times. It was a terrible 
 affliction. But how many men have complaints of 
 the liver, and are as cheerful to live with as the 
 Black Death, or Young's Night Thoughts. Cowper 
 had a famous constitution. Not even Dr. James's 
 powder, or the murderous practices of the faculty, 
 could undermine it. Sadness is not dullness. 
 
 Dear saints, it is not sorrow, as I hear. 
 
 Nor suffering that shuts up eye and ear 
 
 To all which has delighted them before. 
 
 And lets us be what we were once no more ! 
 
 No ! we may suffer deeply, yet retain 
 
 Power to be moved and soothed, for all our pain, 
 
 By what of old pleased us, and will again. 
 
 No ! 'tis the gradual furnace of the world. 
 
 In whose hot air our spirits are upcurled 
 
 Until they crumble, or else grow like steel. 
 
 Which kills in us the bloom, the youth, the spring. 
 
 Which leaves the fierce necessity to feel. 
 
 But takes away the power — this can avail. 
 
 By drying up our joy in everything. 
 
 To make our former pleasures all seem stale. 
 
 I can think of no one to whom these beautiful 
 lines of Mr. Arnold's are so exquisitely appropriate 
 as to Cowper. Nothing could knock the humanity 
 out of him. Solitude, sorrow, madness found him 
 out, threw him down and tore him, as did the 
 devils their victims in the days of old; but when 
 they left him for a season, he rose from his misery 
 as sweet and as human, as interested and as 
 interesting as ever. His descriptions of natural 
 scenery and country-side doings are amongst his 
 best things. He moralises enough, heaven knows! 
 but he keeps his morality out of his descriptions. 
 This is rather a relief after overdoses of Words- 
 worth's pantheism and Keats's paganism. Cowper's 
 Nature is plain county Bucks.
 
 266 WILLIAM COWPER 
 
 The sheepfold here 
 Pours out its fleecy tenants o'er the glebe. 
 At first progressive as a stream, they seek 
 The middle field; but scattered by degrees, 
 Each to his choice, soon whiten all the land. 
 
 The man who wrote that had his eye on the 
 object; but lest the quotation be thought too 
 woolly by a generation which has a passion for 
 fine things, I will allow myself another : 
 
 Nor rural sights alone, but rural sounds. 
 Exhilarate the spirit and restore 
 The tone of languid nature, mighty winds 
 That sweep the skirt of some far-spreading wood 
 Of ancient growth, make music not unlike 
 The dash of ocean on his winding shore 
 
 of rills that slip 
 
 Through the cleft rock, and chiming as they fall 
 Upon loose pebbles, lose themselves at length 
 In matted grass, that with a livelier green 
 Betrays the secret of their silent course. 
 
 In 1 78 1 began the episode of Lady Austen. That 
 lady was doing some small shopping in Olney, in 
 company with her sister, the wife of a neighbour- 
 ing clergyman, when our poet first beheld her. She 
 pleased his eye. Whether, in the words of one of his 
 early poems, he made free to comment on her shape 
 I cannot say; but he hurried home and made Mrs. 
 Unwin ask her to tea. She came. Cowper was 
 seized with a fit of shyness, and very nearly would 
 not go into the room. He conquered the fit, went 
 in and swore eternal friendship. To the very end 
 of her days Mrs. Unwin addressed the poet, her 
 true lover though he was, as " Mr. Cowper." In 
 a week. Lady Austen and he were " Sister Ann " 
 and " William " one to another. Sister Ann had 
 a furnished house in London. She gave it up. She
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 267 
 
 came to live in Olney, next door. She was pretty, 
 she was witty, she played, she sang. She told 
 Cowper the story of John Gilpin, she inspired his 
 Wreck of the " Royal George. '''' The Task was written 
 at her bidding. Day in and day out, Cowper and 
 Lady Austen and Mrs. Unwin were together. One 
 turns instinctively to see what Sainte-Beuve has 
 to say about Lady Austen. " C'etait Lady Austen, 
 veuve d'un baronet. Cette rare personne etait 
 douee des plus heureux dons; elle n'etait plus 
 tres-jeune ni dans la fleur de beaute; elle avait 
 ce qui est mieux, une puissance d'attraction et 
 d'enchantement qui tenait a la transparence de 
 I'ame, une faculte de reconnaissance, de sensibilite 
 emue jusqu'aux larmes pour toute marque de 
 bienveillance dont elle etait I'objet. Tout en elle 
 exprimait une vivacite pure, innocente et tendre. 
 C'etait une creature sympathique, et elle devait 
 tout-a-fait justifier dans le cas present ce mot 
 de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre: ' II y a dans la 
 femme une gaite legere qui dissipe la tristesse 
 de I'homme.' " 
 
 That odd personage, Alexander Knox, who had 
 what used to be called a " primitive," that is, a 
 fourth-century mind, and on whom the Tractarian 
 movement has been plausibly grandfathered, and 
 who was (incongruously) employed by Lord Castle- 
 reagh to help through the Act of Union with 
 Ireland, of which we have lately heard, but who 
 remained all the time primitively unaware that 
 any corruption was going on around him — this 
 odd person, I say, was exercised in his mind about 
 Lady Austen, of whom he had been reading in 
 Hayley's Life. In October 1806 he writes to
 
 268 WILLIAM COWPER 
 
 Bishop Jebb in a solemn strain : " I have rather 
 a severer idea of Lady A. than I should wish to 
 put into writing for publication. I almost suspect 
 she was a very artful woman. But I need not 
 enlarge." He puts it rather differently from 
 Sainte-Beuve, but I dare say they both meant 
 miich the same thing. If Knox meant more it 
 would be necessary to get angry with him. That 
 Lady Austen fell in love with Cowper and would 
 have liked to marry him, but found Mrs. Unwin 
 in the way, is probable enough; but where was 
 the artfulness ? Poor Cowper was no catch. The 
 grandfather of Tractarianism would have been 
 better employed in unmasking the corruption 
 amongst which he had lived, than in darkly sus- 
 pecting a lively lady of designs upon a penniless 
 poet, living in the utmost obscurity on the charity 
 of his relatives.^ 
 
 But this state of things at Olney did not last 
 very long. " Of course not," cackle a chorus of 
 cynics. " It could not! " The Historical Muse, 
 ever averse to theory, is content to say, " It did 
 not," but as she writes the words she smiles. The 
 episode began in 1781, it ended in 1784. It became 
 necessary to part. Cowper may have had his 
 
 ' In the fourth volume of Knox's Remains, in a note on p. 539, 
 is to be found Lord Castlereagh's very strange letter urging Knox 
 to become the historian and apologist of the Union. " And I really 
 think it would come with great advantage before the world in your 
 name, as you are known to be incapable of stating what you do 
 not believe to be true." " But," says Knox himself, " though I was 
 well acquainted with the spirit and intention which actuated Lord C. 
 at that time (and I may truly say all the persons in power), yet 
 the evidence I could bear would be limited to my own honest 
 impressions, for of the details of measures or exigencies I could 
 from memory state nothing." But to get a nervous saint to puff 
 the Union was a good idea.
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 269 
 
 qualms, but he concealed them manfully and 
 
 remained faithful to Mrs. Unwin — 
 
 The patient flower 
 Who possessed his darker hour. 
 
 Lady Austen flew away, and afterwards, as if to 
 prove her levity incurable, married a Frenchman. 
 She died in 1802. English literature owes her a 
 debt of gratitude. Her name is writ large over 
 much that is best in Cowper's poetry. Not, indeed, 
 over the very best; that bears the inscription To 
 Mary. And it was right that it should be so, for 
 Mrs. Unwin had to put up with a good deal. 
 
 The Task and John Gilpin were published 
 together in 1785, and some of Cowper's old friends 
 (notably Lady Hesketh) rallied round the now 
 known poet once more. Lady Hesketh soon begins 
 to fill the chair vacated by Lady Austen, and 
 Cowper's letters to her are amongst his most 
 delightful. Her visits to Olney were eagerly 
 expected, and it was she who persuaded the 
 pair to leave the place for good and all, and 
 move to Weston, which they did in 1786. The 
 following year Cowper went mad again, and made 
 another most desperate attempt upon his life. 
 Again Mary Unwin stood by the poor maniac's 
 side, and again she stood alone. He got better, 
 and worked away at his translation of Homer as 
 hard and wrote letters as charming as ever. But 
 Mrs. Unwin was pretty well done for. Cowper 
 published his Homer by subscription, and must be 
 pronounced a dab hand in the somewhat ignoble 
 art of collecting subscribers. I am not sure that he 
 could not have given Pope points. Pope had a 
 great acquaintance, but he had barely six hundred
 
 270 WILLIAM COWPER 
 
 subscribers. Cowper scraped together upwards of 
 five hundred. As a beggar he was unabashed. He 
 quotes in one of his letters, and appHes to himself, 
 patly enough, Ranger's observation in The Suspi- 
 cious Husband: "There is a degree of assurance in 
 you modest men, that we impudent fellows can 
 never arrive at! " The University of Oxford was, 
 however, too much for him. He beat her portals 
 in vain. She had but one answer, " We subscribe 
 to nothing." Cowper was very angry, and called 
 her " a rich old vixen." She did not mind. The 
 book appeared in 1791. It has many merits, and 
 remains unread. 
 
 The clouds now gathered heavily over the bio- 
 graphy of Cowper. Mrs. Unwin had two paralytic 
 strokes; the old friends began to torture one 
 another. She was silent save when she was irritable, 
 indifferent except when exacting. At last, not a 
 day too soon. Lady Hesketh came to Weston. 
 They were moved into Norfolk — but why prolong 
 the tale ? Mrs. Unwin died at East Dereham on the 
 17th of December, 1796. Thirty-one years had 
 gone since the poet and she first met by chance 
 in Huntingdon. Cowper himself died in April, 
 1800. His last days were made physically com- 
 fortable by the kindness of some Norfolk cousins, 
 and the devotion of a Miss Perowne. But he 
 died in wretchedness and gloom. 
 
 The Castaway was his last original poem: 
 
 I therefore purpose not or dream, 
 
 Descanting on his fate, 
 To give the melancholy theme 
 
 A more enduring date; 
 But misery still delights to trace 
 Its semblance in another's case.
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 271 
 
 Everybody interested in Cowper has of course 
 to make out, as best he may, a picture of the poet 
 for his own use. It is curious how sometimes little 
 scraps of things serve to do this better than deli- 
 berate efforts. In 1800, the year of Cowper's death, 
 his relative, a Dr. Johnson, wrote a letter to John 
 Newton, sending good wishes to the old gentleman, 
 and to his niece. Miss Catlett; and added: " Poor 
 dear Mr. Cowper, oh that he were as tolerable as 
 he was, even in those days when, dining at his 
 house in Buckinghamshire with you and that lady, 
 I could not help smiling to see his pleasant face 
 when he said, ' Miss Catlett, shall I give you a 
 piece of cutlet ? ' " It was a very small joke indeed, 
 and it is a very humble little quotation, but for 
 me it has long served, in the niind's eye, for a 
 vignette of the poet, doomed yet debonnaire. 
 Romney's picture, with that frightful nightcap 
 and eyes gleaming with madness, is a pestilent 
 thing one would forget if one could. Cowper's 
 pleasant face when he said, " Miss Catlett, shall 
 I give you a piece of cutlet ? " is a much more 
 agreeable picture to find a small corner for in 
 one's memory.
 
 H 
 
 RICHARD CUMBERLAND 
 
 1894 
 
 " ''^ ^^ E has written comedies at which we 
 have cried and tragedies at which we 
 have laughed; he has composed in- 
 decent novels and religious epics; he has pandered 
 to the public lust for personal anecdote by writing 
 his own life and the private history of his acquaint- 
 ances." Of whom is this a portrait, and who is the 
 limner ? What are the names of the comedies and 
 the tragedies and the novels thus highly recom- 
 mended to the curious reader ? These are questions, 
 I flatter myself, wholly devoid of public interest. 
 
 The quotation is from a review in the Quarterly, 
 written by Sir Walter Scott, of old Richard Cum- 
 berland's last novel, John de Lancaster, pubhshed 
 in 1809, when its author, " the Terence of Eng- 
 land," was well-nigh eighty years of age. The 
 passage is a fierce one, but Scott's good-nature 
 was proof against everything but affectation. No 
 man minded a bad novel less than the author of 
 Guy Mannering and 'The Heart of Midlothian. I 
 am certain he could have pulled Bishop Thirlwall 
 through The Wide, Wide World, in the middle of 
 which, for some unaccountable reason, that great 
 novel-reading prelate stuck fast. But an author 
 had only to pooh-pooh the public taste, to sneer 
 at popularity, to discourse solemnly on his function 
 as a teacher of his age and master of his craft, to 
 make Sir Walter show his teeth, and his fangs 
 
 272
 
 RICHARD CUMBERLAND 273 
 
 were formidable; and the storm of his wrath all 
 the more tremendous because bursting from a 
 clear sky. 
 
 I will quote a few words from the passage in 
 John de Lancaster which made Scott so angry, and 
 which he pronounced a doleful lamentation over 
 the " praise and pudding which Cumberland alleges 
 have been gobbled up by his contemporaries " : 
 
 If in the course of my literary labours I had been less 
 studious to adhere to nature and simplicity, I am perfectly 
 convinced I should have stood higher in estimation with 
 the purchasers of copyright, and probably have been read 
 and patronised by my contemporaries in the proportion of 
 ten to one. 
 
 It seems a harmless kind of bleat after all, but 
 it was enough to sting Scott to fury, and make him 
 fall upon the old man in a manner somewhat too 
 savage and tartarly. Some years later, and after 
 Cumberland was dead. Sir Walter wrote a sketch 
 of his life in the vein we are better accustomed to 
 associate with the name of Scott. 
 
 Cumberland was a voluminous author, having 
 written two epics, thirty-eight dramatic pieces, 
 including a revised version of Timon of Athens — 
 of which Horace Walpole said, " he has caught the 
 manners and diction of the original so exactly that 
 I think it is full as bad a play as it was before he 
 corrected it " — a score or two of fugitive poetical 
 compositions, including some verses to Dr. James, 
 whose powders played almost as large a part in 
 the lives of men of that time as Garrick himself, 
 numerous prose publications and three novels, 
 Arundel, Henry, and John de Lancaster. Of the 
 novels, Henry is the one to which Sir Walter's 
 epitaph is least inapplicable — but Cumberland 
 I s
 
 274 RICHARD CUMBERLAND 
 
 meant no harm. Were I to be discovered on 
 Primrose Hill, or any other eminence, reading 
 Henry, I should blush no deeper than if the book 
 had been David. Grieve. 
 
 Cumberland has, of course, no place in men's 
 memories by virtue of his plays, poems, or novels. 
 Even the catholic Chambers gives no extracts from 
 Cumberland in the Encyclopedia. What keeps him 
 for ever alive is — first, his place in Goldsmith's 
 great poem. Retaliation', secondly, his memoirs, 
 to which Sir Walter refers so unkindly; and thirdly, 
 the tradition — the well-supported tradition — that 
 he was the original Sir Fretful Plagiary. 
 
 On this last point we have the authority of 
 Croker, and there is none better for anything dis- 
 agreeable. Croker says he knew Cumberland well 
 for the last dozen years of his life, and that to his 
 last day he resembled Sir Fretful. 
 
 The Memoirs were first published in 1806, in a 
 splendidly printed quarto. The author wanted 
 money badly, and Lackington's house gave him 
 5^500 for his manuscript. It is an excellent book. 
 I do not quarrel with Mr. Leslie Stephen's descrip- 
 tion of it in the National Dictionary oj Biography : 
 " A very loose book, dateless, inaccurate, but with 
 interesting accounts of men of note." All I mean 
 by excellent is excellent to read. The Memoirs 
 touch upon many points of interest. Cumberland 
 was born in the Master's Lodge, at Trinity, Cam- 
 bridge, in the Judge's Chamber — a room hung 
 round with portraits of " hanging judges " in their 
 official robes, and where a great Anglican divine 
 and preacher once told me he had passed a sleep- 
 less night, so scared was he by these sinful emblems
 
 RICHARD CUMBERLAND 275 
 
 of human justice. There is an admirable account 
 in Cumberland's Memoirs of his maternal grand- 
 father, the famous Richard Bentley, and of the 
 Vice-Master, Dr. Walker, fit to be read along with 
 De Quincey's spirited essay on the same subject. 
 Then the scene is shifted to Dublin Castle, where 
 Cumberland was Ulster-Secretary when Halifax 
 was Lord-Lieutenant, and Single-speech Hamilton 
 had acquired by purchase (for a brief season) the 
 brains of Edmund Burke. There is a wonderful 
 sketch of Bubb Dodington and his villa " La 
 Trappe," on the banks of the Thames, whither 
 one fair evening Wedderburn brought Mrs. Haugh- 
 ton in a hackney-coach. You read of Dr. Johnson 
 and Dr. Goldsmith, of Garrick and Foote, and 
 participate in the bustle and malice of the play- 
 house. Unluckily, Cumberland was sent to Spain 
 on a mission, and came home with a grievance. 
 This part is dull, but in all other respects the 
 Memoirs are good to read. 
 
 Cumberland's father, who became an Irish bishop, 
 is depicted by his son as a most pleasing character; 
 and no doubt of his having been so would ever have 
 entered a head always disposed to think well of 
 fathers had not my copy of the Memoirs been 
 annotated throughout in the nervous, scholarly 
 hand of a long-previous owner who, for some 
 reason or another, hated the Cumberlands, the 
 Whig clergy, and the Irish people with a hatred 
 which found ample room and verge enough in the 
 spacious margins of the Memoirs. 
 
 I print one only of these splenetic notes : 
 
 I forget whether I have noticed this elsewhere, therefore 
 I will make sure. In the novel Arundel, Cumberland has
 
 276 RICHARD CUMBERLAND 
 
 drawn an exact picture of himself as secretary to Halifax, 
 and has made the father of the hero a clergyman and a keen 
 electioneerer — the vilest character in fiction. The laborious 
 exculpation of Parson Cumberland in these Memoirs does 
 not wipe out the scandal of such a picture. In spite of all he 
 says, we cannot help suspecting that Parson Cumberland 
 and Joseph Arundel had a likeness. N.B. — In both novels 
 {i.e., Arundel and Henry) the portrait of a modern clergyman 
 is too true. But it is strange that Cumberland, thus hankering 
 after the Church, should have volunteered two such characters 
 as Joseph Arundel and Claypole. 
 
 " Whispering tongues can poison truth," and a 
 persistent annotator who writes a legible hand is 
 not easily shaken off. 
 
 Perhaps the best story in the book is the one 
 about which there is most doubt. I refer to the 
 well-known and often-quoted account of the first 
 night of She Stoops to Conquer, and of the famous 
 band of claqueurs who early took their places, 
 determined to see the play through. Cumberland 
 tells the story with the irresistible verve of false- 
 hood — of the early dinner at the " Shakespeare 
 Tavern," " where Samuel Johnson took the chair 
 at the head of a long table, and was the life and 
 soul of the corps " ; of the guests assembled, in- 
 cluding Fitzherbert (who had committed suicide 
 at an earlier date), of the adjournment to the 
 theatre with Adam Drummond of amiable memory, 
 who " was gifted by Nature with the most sonorous 
 and at the same time the most contagious laugh 
 that ever echoed from the human lungs. The 
 neighing of the horse of the son of Hystaspes was 
 a whisper to it; the whole thunder of the theatre 
 could not drown it "; and on the story rolls. 
 
 It has to be given up. There was a dinner, but 
 it is doubtful whether Cumberland was at it; and 
 as for the proceedings at the theatre, others who
 
 RICHARD CUMBERLAND 277 
 
 were there have pronounced Cumberland's story 
 a bit of blague. According to the newspapers of 
 the day, Cumberland, instead of sitting by Drum- 
 mond's side and telling him when to laugh in his 
 peculiar manner, was visibly chagrined by the 
 success of the piece, and as wretched as any man 
 could well be. But Adam Drummond must have 
 been a reality. His laugh still echoes in one's ears.
 
 HANNAH MORE 
 
 1894 
 
 AN ingenious friend of mine, who has collected 
 / \ a library in which every book is either a 
 JL A. masterpiece of wit or a miracle of rarity, 
 found great fault with me the other day for adding 
 to my motley heap the writings of Mrs. Hannah 
 More. In vain I pleaded I had given but eight 
 shillings and sixpence for the nineteen volumes, 
 neatly bound and lettered on the back. He was 
 not thinking, so he protested, of my purse, but of 
 my taste, and he went away, spurning the gravel 
 under his feet, irritated that there should be such 
 men as I. 
 
 I, however, am prepared to brazen it out. I 
 freely admit that the celebrated Mrs. Hannah More 
 is one of the most detestable writers that ever held 
 a pen. She flounders like a huge conger-eel in an 
 ocean of dingy morality. She may have been a 
 wit in her youth, though I am not aware of any 
 evidence of it — certainly her poem, Bas Bleu, is 
 none — but for all the rest of her days, and they 
 were many, she was an encyclopaedia of all literary 
 vices. You may search her nineteen volumes 
 through without lighting upon one original thought, 
 one happy phrase. Her religion lacks reality. Not 
 a single expression of genuine piety, of heart-felt 
 emotion, ever escapes her lips. She is never pathetic, 
 never terrible. Her creed is powerless either to 
 
 278
 
 HANNAH MORE 279 
 
 attract the well-disposed or make the guilty- 
 tremble. No naughty child ever read The Fair- 
 child Family or Stories from the Church Catechism 
 without quaking and quivering like a short-haired 
 puppy after a ducking; but then Mrs. Sherwood 
 was a woman of genius, whilst Mrs. Hannah More 
 was a pompous failure. 
 
 Still, she has a merit of her own, just enough to 
 enable a middle-aged man to chew the cud of 
 reflection as he hastily turns her endless pages. 
 She is an explanatory author, helping you to 
 understand how sundry people who were old when 
 you were young came to be the folk they were, 
 and to have the books upon their shelves they had. 
 
 Hannah More was the first, and I trust the worst, 
 of a large class — " the ugliest of her daughters 
 Hannah," if I may parody a poet she affected to 
 admire. This class may be imperfectly described 
 as " the well-to-do Christian." It inhabited snug 
 places in the country, and kept an excellent, if 
 not dainty, table. The money it saved in a ball- 
 room it spent upon a greenhouse. Its horses were 
 fat, and its coachman invariably present at family 
 prayers. Its pet virtue was Church twice on Sunday, 
 and its peculiar horrors theatrical entertainments, 
 dancing, and threepenny points. Outside its garden 
 wall lived the poor who, if virtuous, were for ever 
 curtsying to the ground or wearing neat uniforms, 
 except when expiring upon truckle-beds beseech- 
 ing God to bless the young ladies of The Grange 
 or the Manor House, as the case might be. 
 
 As a book Coelebs in Search of a Wife is as odious 
 as it is absurd — yet for the reason already assigned 
 it may be read with a certain curiosity — but as it
 
 28o HANNAH MORE 
 
 would be cruelty to attempt to make good my 
 point by quotation, I must leave it as it is. 
 
 It is characteristic of the unreality of Hannah 
 More that she prefers Akenside to Cowper, despite 
 the latter's superior piety. Cowper's sincerity and 
 pungent satire frightened her; the verbosity of 
 Akenside was much to her mind: 
 
 Sir John is a passionate lover of poetry, in which he has a 
 fine taste. He read it [a passage from Akenside's Pleasures 
 of Imagination] with much spirit and feeUng, especially these 
 truly classical lines: 
 
 Mind, mind alone — bear witness, earth and heaven — 
 
 The living fountains in itself contains 
 
 Of Beauteous and Sublime ; here hand in hand 
 
 Sit paramount the graces ; here enthroned 
 
 Celestial Venus, with divinest airs. 
 
 Invites the soul to never-fading joy. 
 
 " The reputation of this exquisite passage," said he, laying 
 down the book, " is established by the consenting suffrage 
 of all men of taste, though, by the critical countenance you 
 are beginning to put on you look as if you had a mind to 
 attack it." 
 
 " So far from it," said I [Coelebs], " that I know nothing 
 more splendid in the whole mass of our poetry." 
 
 Miss More had an odd life before she underwent 
 what she calls a " revolution in her sentiments," 
 a revolution, however, which I fear left her heart 
 of hearts unchanged. She consorted with wits, 
 though always, be it fairly admitted, on terms of 
 decorum. She wrote three tragedies, which were 
 not rejected as they deserved to be, but duly 
 appeared on the boards of London and Bath with 
 prologues and epilogues by Garrick and by Sheri- 
 dan. She dined and supped and made merry. She 
 had a prodigious flirtation with Dr. Johnson, who 
 called her a saucy girl, albeit she was thirty-seven; 
 and once, for there was no end to his waggery,
 
 HANNAH MORE 281 
 
 lamented she had not married Chatterton, " that 
 posterity might have seen a propagation of poets." 
 The good doctor, however, sickened of her flattery, 
 and one of the rudest speeches even he ever made 
 was addressed to her. 
 
 After Johnson's death Hannah met Boswell, full 
 of his intended book, which she did her best to 
 spoil with her oily fatuity. Said she to Boswell, 
 " I beseech your tenderness for our virtuous and 
 most revered departed friend; I beg you will miti- 
 gate some of his asperities," to which diabolical 
 counsel the Inimitable replied roughly, " He would 
 not cut off his claws nor make a tiger a cat to 
 please anybody." 
 
 The most moving incident in Hannah More's life 
 occurred near its close, and when she was a lone, 
 lorn woman — ^her sisters Mary, Betty, Sally, and 
 Patty having all predeceased her. She and they 
 had long lived in a nice house or " place " called 
 Barley Wood, in the neighbourhood of Bristol, and 
 here her sisters one after another died, leaving poor 
 Hannah in solitary grandeur to the tender mercies 
 of Mrs. Susan, the housekeeper; Miss Teddy, the 
 lady's-maid; Mrs. Rebecca, the housemaid; Mrs. 
 Jane, the cook; Miss Sally, the scullion; Mr. 
 Timothy, the coachman; Mr. John, the gardener; 
 and Mr. Tom, the gardener's man. Eight servants 
 and one aged pilgrim — of such was the household 
 of Barley Wood! 
 
 Outwardly decorum reigned. Poor Miss More 
 fondly imagined her domestics doted on her, and 
 that they joyfully obeyed her laws. It was the 
 practice at family prayer for each of the servants 
 to repeat a text. Visitors were much impressed,
 
 282 HANNAH MORE 
 
 and went away delighted. But like so many other 
 things on this round world, it was all hollow. These 
 menials were not what they seemed. 
 
 After Miss More had heard them say their texts 
 and had gone to bed, their day began. They gave 
 parties to the servants and tradespeople of the 
 vicinity (pleasing word), and at last, in mere super- 
 fluity of naughtiness, hired a large room a mile of! 
 and issued invitations to a great ball. This undid 
 them. There happened to be at Barley Wood on 
 the very night of the dance a vigilant visitor who 
 had her suspicions, and who accordingly kept 
 watch and ward. She heard the texts, but she 
 did not go to bed, and from her window she saw 
 the whole household, under cover of night, steal 
 off to their promiscuous friskings, leaving behind 
 them poor Miss Sally only, whose sad duty it 
 was to let them in the next morning, which she 
 duly performed. 
 
 Friends were called in and grave consultations 
 held, and in the end Miss More was told how she 
 had been wounded in her own household. It was 
 sore news; she bore it well, wisely determined to 
 quit Barley Wood once and for ever, and live, as 
 a decent old lady should, in a terrace in Clifton. 
 The wicked servants were not told of this resolve 
 until the actual moment of departure had arrived, 
 when they were summoned into the drawing-room, 
 where they found their mistress and a company of 
 friends. In feeling tones Miss Hannah More up- 
 braided them for their unfaithfulness. " You have 
 driven me," said she, " from my own home, and 
 forced me to seek a refuge among strangers." So 
 saying, she stepped into her carriage and was
 
 HANNAH MORE 283 
 
 driven away. There is surely something Miltonic 
 about this scene, which is, at all events, better than 
 anything in Akenside's Pleasures oj Imagination. 
 
 The old lady was of course much happier at 
 No. 4, Windsor Terrace, Clifton, than she had been 
 at Barley Wood. She was eighty-three years of age 
 when she took up house there, and eighty-nine 
 when she died, which she did on the ist of Septem- 
 ber, 1833. I am indebted for these melancholy 
 — and, I believe, veracious — particulars to that 
 amusing book of Joseph Cottle's called Early 
 Recollections, chiefly relating to the late Samuel 
 Taylor Coleridge during his long residence in Bristol. 
 
 I still maintain that Hannah More's works in 
 nineteen volumes are worth eight shillings and 
 sixpence.
 
 ARTHUR YOUNG 
 1906 
 
 THE name of Arthur Young is a familiar 
 one to all readers of that history which 
 begins with the forebodings of the French 
 Revolution. Thousands of us learnt to be inter- 
 ested in him as the " good Arthur," " the excellent 
 Arthur," of Thomas Carlyle, a writer who had 
 the art of making not only his own narrative, but 
 the sources of it, attractive. Even " Carrion- 
 Heath," in the famous introductory chapter to 
 the Cromwell, is invested with a kind of charm, 
 whilst in the stormy firmament of the French 
 Revolution the star of Arthur Young twinkles with 
 a mild eifulgency. The autobiography of such a 
 man could hardly fail to be interesting.^ The 
 "good Arthur" was born in 1741, the younger 
 son of a small " squarson " who inherited from 
 his father the manor of Bradfield Combust, in 
 Suffolk, but held the living of Thames Ditton. 
 Here he made the acquaintance of the Onslow 
 family, and Speaker Onslow was one of Arthur's 
 godfathers. The Rev. Dr. Young died in 1759, 
 much in debt. The Bradfield property had been 
 settled for life on his wife, who had brought her 
 husband some fortune, and to the manor-house 
 she retired to economise. 
 
 * The Autobiography of Arthur Young. Edited by M. Betham 
 Edwards. Smith, Elder and Co. 
 
 284
 
 ARTHUR YOUNG 285 
 
 Arthur's education had been muddled; and 
 an attempt to make a merchant of him having 
 fallen through, he found himself, on his father's 
 death, aged eighteen, " without education, pro- 
 fession, or employment," and his whole fortune, 
 during his mother's life, consisting of a copyhold 
 farm of twenty acres, producing as many pounds. 
 In these circumstances, to think of literature was 
 well-nigh inevitable, and, in 1762, the auto- 
 biography tells us : 
 
 I set on foot a periodical publication, entitled the Universal 
 Museum, which came out monthly, printed with glorious 
 imprudence on my own account. I waited on Dr. Johnson, 
 who was sitting by the fire so half-dressed and slovenly a 
 figure as to make me stare at him. I stated my plan, and 
 begged that he would favour me with a paper once a 
 month, offering at the same time any remuneration that he 
 might name. 
 
 Here we see dimly prefigured a modern editor 
 prematurely soliciting the support of Great Names. 
 But the Cham of literature, himself the son of a 
 bookseller, would have none of it. 
 
 J 
 
 " No, sir," he replied; " such a work would be sure to fail 
 if the booksellers have not the property, and you will lose a 
 great deal of money by it." 
 
 " Certainly, sir," I said, " if I am not fortunate enough to 
 induce authors of real talent to contribute." 
 
 " No, sir, you are mistaken; such authors will not support 
 such a work, nor will you persuade them to write in it. You 
 will purchase disappointment by the loss of your money, 
 and I advise you by all means to give up the plan." 
 
 Somebody was introduced, and I took my leave. 
 
 The Universal Museum, none the less, appeared, 
 but after five numbers Young " procured a meeting 
 of ten or a dozen booksellers, and had the luck 
 and address to persuade them to take the whole 
 scheme upon themselves." He then calmly adds.
 
 286 ARTHUR YOUNG 
 
 " I believe no success ever attended it." It was, 
 indeed, lOO years before its time. Literature 
 abandoned, Young took one of his mother's farms. 
 " I had no more idea of farming than of physic 
 or divinity," nor did he, man of European repu- 
 tation as a farmer though he soon became, ever 
 make farming pay. He had an itching pen, and 
 after four years' farming (i 763-1 766) he pubhshed 
 the result of his experience. Never, surely, before 
 has an author spoken of his first-born as in the 
 autobiography Young speaks of this publication: 
 
 And the circumstance which perhaps of all others in my 
 life I most deeply regretted and considered as a sin of the 
 blackest dye was the publishing of my experience during 
 these four years, which, speaking as a farmer, was nothing 
 but ignorance, folly, presumption, and rascality. 
 
 None the less, it was writing this rascally book 
 that seems to have given him the idea of those 
 agricultural tours which were to make his name 
 famous throughout the world. His Southern 
 tour was in 1767, his Northern in 1768, and his 
 Eastern in 1770. The subject he specially illumin- 
 ated in these epoch-making books was the rotation 
 of crops, though he occasionally diverged upon 
 deep-ploughing and kindred themes. The tours 
 excited, for the first time, the agricultural spirit 
 of Great Britain, and their author almost at once 
 became a celebrated man. 
 
 In 1765 Young married the wrong woman, and 
 started upon a career of profound matrimonial 
 discomfort, and even misery; a blunt, truthful 
 writer, he makes no bones about it. It was an 
 unhappy marriage from its beginning in 1765 to 
 its end in 181 5. Young himself, though by no
 
 ARTHUR YOUNG 287 
 
 means vivacious in this autobiography, where he 
 frankly complains of himself as having no more 
 wit than a fig, was a very popular person with all 
 classes and both sexes. He was an enormous 
 diner-out, and his authority as an agriculturist, 
 united to his undeniable charm as a companion, 
 threw open to him all the great places in the 
 country. But his finances were a perpetual trouble. 
 On carrot seeds and cabbages he was an authority, 
 but from 1766 to 1775 his income never exceeded 
 ^^300 a year. He had an excellent mother, whom 
 he dearly loved, and who with the characteristic 
 bluntness of the family bade him think less about 
 carrots and more about his Creator. " You may 
 call all this rubbish if you please, but a time will 
 come when you will be convinced whose notions 
 are rubbish, yours or mine." And the old lady 
 was quite right, as mothers so frequently turn out 
 to be. In 1778 Young went over to Ireland as 
 agent to Lord Kingsborough. He got £500 down, 
 and was to have an annual salary of £500 and a 
 house. Young soon got to work, and became 
 anxious to persuade his employer to let his lands 
 direct to the occupying cottar, and so get rid of 
 the middlemen. This did not suit a certain Major 
 Thornhill, a relative and leaseholder, and there- 
 upon a pretty plot was hatched. Lady K. had a 
 Catholic governess, a Miss Crosby, upon whom it 
 was thought my lord occasionally cast the eye of 
 partiality, whilst Arthur himself got on very well 
 with her ladyship, who was heard to pronounce 
 him to be, as he was, " one of the most lively, 
 agreeable fellows." Out of these materials the 
 Major and his helpmeet concocted a double plot
 
 288 ARTHUR YOUNG 
 
 — namely, to make the lord jealous of the steward, 
 and the lady jealous of the governess, and to 
 cause both lord and lady respectively to believe 
 that the steward was deeply engaged both in 
 abetting the amour of the lord and the governess, 
 and in prosecuting his own amour with the lady. 
 The result was that both governess and steward 
 got notice to quit; but — and this is very Irish — 
 both went off with life annuities, the governess 
 with one of ^50 per annum, and the steward with 
 one of ^72, and, what is still more odd, we find 
 Young at the end of his life in receipt of his annuity. 
 They were an expensive couple, these two. 
 
 In 1780 Young published his Irish Tour, which 
 was immediately successful and popular in both 
 kingdoms. In it he attacked the bounty paid on 
 the land-carriage of corn to Dublin. The bounty 
 was, in the session of Parliament next after the 
 publication of Young's book, reduced by one-half 
 and soon given up entirely. Young maintains 
 that this saved Ireland £80,000 a year. Nobody 
 seems to have said " Thank you." 
 
 In May, 1783, was born the child " Bobbin," 
 whose death, fourteen years later, was to change 
 the current of Young's life. The following year 
 Arthur Young paid his first visit to France, con- 
 fining himself, however, to Calais and its neigh- 
 bourhood, and in the same year his mother died, 
 and, by an arrangement with his eldest brother, 
 " this patch of landed property," as Young calls 
 Bradfield, descended upon him. His first famous 
 journey in France was made between May and 
 November, 1787, and cost the marvellously small 
 sum of 3^118 15s. 2d. His second and third French
 
 ARTHUR YOUNG 289 
 
 journeys were made in July, 1788, and in June, 
 1789. The third was the longest, and extended 
 into 1790. Three years later Young was appointed, 
 by Pitt, Secretary of the then Board of Agriculture. 
 A melancholy account is given by Young of a 
 visit he paid Burke at Gregory's in 1796. Young 
 drove there in the chariot of his fussy chief, Sir 
 John Sinclair, to discover what Burke's intentions 
 might be as to an intended publication of his 
 relating to the price of labour. The account, which 
 occupies four pages, is too long for quotation. 
 It concludes thus: 
 
 I am glad once more to have seen and conversed with the 
 man whom I hold to possess the greatest and most brilliant 
 gifts of any penman of the age in which he lived. Whose 
 conversation has often fascinated me, whose eloquence has 
 charmed; whose writings have delighted and instructed the 
 world; whose name will without question descend to the 
 latest posterity. But to behold so great a genius, so deepened 
 with melancholy, stooping with infirmity of body, feeling 
 the anguish of a lacerated mind, and sinking to the grave 
 under accumulated misery — to see all this in a character I 
 venerate, and apparently without resource or comfort, wounded 
 every feeling of my soul, and I left him the next day almost 
 a^ low-spirited as himself. 
 
 But Young himself was soon to pass into the 
 same Valley of the Shadow, not so much of Death 
 as of Joyless Life. His beloved and idolised Bobbin 
 died on July 14th, 1797.^ She seems to have been 
 a wise little maiden, to whom her father wrote 
 most affectionate letters, full of rather unsuitable 
 details, political and financial and otherwise, 
 and not scrupling to speak of the child's mother 
 
 ' Little Bobbin (Martha) lies buried in her father's pew in 
 Bradfield Combust (Suffolk) Church, which also contains in the 
 vestry a tablet inscribed to her memory with an epitaph of her 
 father's composition that still tears the heart. 
 
 I T
 
 290 ARTHUR YOUNG 
 
 in a disagreeable manner. Bobbin replies with 
 delightful composure to these worrying letters: 
 
 I have just got six of the most beautiful little rabbits you 
 ever saw; they skip about so prettily you can't think, and I 
 shall have some more in a few weeks. Having had so much 
 physic, I am right down tired of it. I take it still twice a day 
 — my appetite is better. What can you mind politics so for ? 
 I don't think about them. — Well, good-bye, and believe me, 
 dear papa, your dutiful Daughter. 
 
 After poor little Bobbin's death, it happened to 
 Arthur Young even as his mother foretold. Carrots 
 and crops and farming tours hastily retreat, and 
 we find the eminent agriculturist busying himself, 
 with the same seriousness and good faith he had 
 devoted to the rotation of the crops, with the 
 sermons and treatises of Clarke and Jortin and 
 Seeker and Tillotson, etc., and all to discover what 
 had become of his dear little Bobbin. His outlook 
 upon the world was changed — the great parties 
 at Petworth, at Euston, at Woburn struck him 
 differently; the huge irreligion of the world filled 
 him as for the first time with amazement and horror: 
 
 How few years are passed since I should have pushed on 
 eagerly to Woburn ! This time twelve months I dined with 
 the Duke on Sunday — the party not very numerous, but 
 chiefly of rank — the entertainment more splendid than usual 
 there. He expects me to-day, but I have more pleasure in 
 resting, going twice to church, and eating a morsel of cold 
 lamb at a very humble inn, than partaking of gaiety and 
 dissipation at a great table which might as well be spread 
 for a company of heathens as English lords and men of fashion. 
 
 It is all mighty fine calling this religious hypo- 
 chondria and depression of spirits. It is one of the 
 facts of life. Young stuck to his post, and did his 
 work, and quarrelled with his wife to the end, or 
 nearly so. He cannot have been so lively and agree-
 
 ARTHUR YOUNG 291 
 
 able a companion as of old, for we find him in 
 November, 1806, at Euston, endeavouring to im- 
 press on the Duke of Grafton that by his tenets 
 he had placed himself entirely under the covenant 
 of works, and that he must be tried for them, and 
 that " I would not be in such a situation for ten 
 thousand worlds. He was mild and more patient 
 than I expected." Perhaps, after all, Carlyle was 
 not so far wrong when he praised our aristocracy 
 for their " politeness." In 1808 Young became 
 blind. In 1815 his wife died. In 1820 he died 
 himself, leaving behind him seven packets of manu- 
 script and twelve folio volumes of correspondence. 
 Young's great work. Travels during the Tears 
 lySy, 1788, and 1789, undertaken more particularly 
 with a View of Ascertaining the Cultivation, Wealth, 
 Resources, and National Prosperity of the Kingdom 
 of France, published in 1792, is one of those 
 books which will always be a great favourite with 
 somebody. It will outlive eloquence and outstay 
 philosophy. It contains some famous passages.
 
 THOMAS PAINE 
 1905 
 
 PROVERBS are said to be but half-truths, 
 but " give a dog a bad name and hang him " 
 is a saying almost as veracious as it is 
 felicitous; and to no one can it possibly be applied 
 with greater force than to Thomas Paine, the 
 rebellious staymaker, the bankrupt tobacconist, 
 the amazing author of Common-sense, The Rights 
 oj Man, and ^he Age of Reason. 
 
 Until quite recently "Tom Paine" lay without 
 the pale of toleration. No circle of liberality was 
 constructed wide enough to include him. Even the 
 scouted Unitarian scouted Thomas. He was " the 
 infamous Paine," " the vulgar atheist." Whenever 
 mentioned in pious discourse it was but to be waved 
 on one side as thus : " No one of my hearers is 
 likely to be led astray by the scurrilous blasphemies 
 of Paine." 
 
 I can well remember when an asserted intimacy 
 with the writings of Paine marked a man from his 
 fellows and invested him in children's minds with 
 a horrid fascination. The writings themselves 
 were only to be seen in bookshops of evil reputa- 
 tion, and, when hastily turned over with furtive 
 glances, proved to be printed in small type and on 
 villainous paper. For a boy to have bought them 
 and taken them inside a decent home would have 
 
 292
 
 THOMAS PAINE 293 
 
 been to run the risk of fierce wrath in this hfe and 
 the threat of it in the next. If ever there was a 
 hung dog, his name was "Tom Paine." 
 
 But History is, as we know, for ever revising her 
 records. None of her judgments are final. A Life 
 of Thomas Paine, in two portly and well-printed 
 volumes, with gilt tops, wide margins, spare leaves 
 at the end, and all the other signs and tokens 
 of literary respectability, has lately appeared. 
 No President, no Prime Minister — nay, no Bishop 
 or Moderator — need hope to have his memoirs 
 printed in better style than are these of Thomas 
 Paine, by Mr. Moncure D. Conway. Were any 
 additional proof required of the complete resuscita- 
 tion of Paine's reputation, it might be found in the 
 fact that his Life is in two volumes, though it would 
 have been far better told in one. 
 
 Mr. Conway beheves implicitly in Paine — not 
 merely in his virtue and intelligence, but that he 
 was a truly great man, who played a great part 
 in human affairs. He will no more admit that 
 Paine was a busybody, inflated with conceit and 
 with a strong dash of insolence, than he will that 
 Thomas was a drunkard. That Paine's speech 
 was undoubtedly plain and his nose undeniably red 
 is as far as Mr. Conway will go. If we are to follow 
 the biographer the whole way, we must not only 
 unhang the dog, but give him sepulture amongst 
 the sceptred Sovereigns who rule us from their urns. 
 
 Thomas Paine was born at Thetford, in Norfolk, 
 in January, 1737, and sailed for America in 1774, 
 then being thirty-seven years of age. Up to this 
 date he was a rank failure. His trade was stay- 
 making, but he had tried his hand at many things.
 
 294 THOMAS PAINE 
 
 He was twice an Excise officer, but was twice dis- 
 missed the service, the first time for falsely pre- 
 tending to have made certain inspections which, 
 in fact, he had not made, and the second time 
 for carrying on business in an excisable article — 
 tobacco, to wit — without the leave of the Board. 
 Paine had married the tobacconist's business, but 
 neither the marriage nor the business prospered; 
 the second was sold by auction, and the first 
 terminated by mutual consent. 
 
 Mr. Conway labours over these early days of his 
 hero very much, but he can make nothing of them. 
 Paine was an Excise officer at Lewes, where, so 
 Mr. Conway reminds us, " seven centuries before 
 Paine opened his office in Lewes, came Harold's 
 son, possibly to take charge of the Excise as 
 established by Edward the Confessor, just de- 
 ceased." This device of biographers is a little 
 stale. The Confessor was guiltless of the Excise,-"^ 
 
 Paine's going to America was due to Benjamin 
 Franklin, who made Paine's acquaintance in 
 London, and, having the wit to see his ability, 
 recommended him " as a clerk or assistant-tutor 
 in a school or assistant-surveyor." Thus armed, 
 Paine made his appearance in Philadelphia, where 
 he at once obtained employment as editor of an 
 intended periodical called the Pennsylvanian Maga- 
 zine or American Museum, the first number of which 
 appeared in January, 1775. Never was anything 
 luckier. Paine was, without knowing it, a born 
 journalist. His capacity for writing on the spur of 
 the moment was endless, and his delight in doing 
 
 ' Pym has been termed the Father of the Excise. See Dowell's 
 History of Taxation, vol. ii. p. 9.
 
 THOMAS PAINE 295 
 
 so boundless. He had no difficulty for " copy," 
 though in those days contributors were few. He 
 needed no contributors. He was " Atlanticus "; 
 he was "Vox Populi "; he was " iEsop." The 
 unsigned articles were also mostly his. Having 
 at last, after many adventures and false starts, 
 found his vocation, Paine stuck to it. He spent 
 the rest of his days with a pen in his hand, scribbling 
 his advice and obtruding his counsel on men and 
 nations. Both were usually of excellent quality. 
 
 Paine was also happy in the moment of his 
 arrival in America. The War of Independence 
 was imminent, and in April, 1775, occurred "the 
 massacre of Lexington." The Colonists were 
 angry, but puzzled. They hardly knew what they 
 wanted. They lacked a definite opinion to entertain 
 and a cry to asseverate. Paine had no doubts. 
 He hated British institutions with all the hatred 
 of a civil servant who has had " the sack." 
 
 In January, 1776, he published his pamphlet 
 Common-sense, which must be ranked with the 
 most famous pamphlets ever written. It is difficult 
 to wade through now, but even The Conduct of 
 the Allies is not easy reading, and yet between 
 Paine and Swift there is a great gulf fixed. The 
 keynote of Com?non-sense was separation once and 
 for ever, and the establishment of a great Republic 
 of the West. It hit between wind and water, had 
 a great sale, and made its author a personage and, 
 in his own opinion, a divinity. 
 
 Paine now became the penman of the rebels. 
 His series of manifestoes, entitled The Crisis, were 
 widely read and carried healing on their wings, 
 and in 1777 he was elected Secretary to the
 
 296 THOMAS PAINE 
 
 Committee of Foreign Affairs. Charles Lamb once 
 declared that Rousseau was a good enough Jesus 
 Christ for the French, and he was capable of 
 declaring Tom Paine a good enough Milton for 
 the Yankees. However that may be, Paine was an 
 indefatigable and useful public servant. He was 
 a bad ganger for King George, but he was an 
 admirable scribe for a revolution conducted on 
 constitutional principles. 
 
 To follow his history through the war would be 
 tedious. What Washington and Jefferson really 
 thought of him we shall never know. He was never 
 mercenary, but his pride was wounded that so 
 little recognition of his astounding services was 
 forthcoming. The ingratitude of kings was a 
 commonplace; the ingratitude of peoples an un- 
 pleasing novelty. But Washington bestirred himself 
 at last, and Paine was voted an estate of 277 acres, 
 more or less, and a sum of money. This was in 1784. 
 
 Three years afterwards Thomas visited England, 
 where he kept good company and was very use- 
 fully employed engineering, for which excellent 
 pursuit he would appear to have had great natural 
 aptitude. Blackfriars Bridge had just tumbled 
 down, and it was Paine's laudable ambition to 
 build its successor in iron. But the Bastille fell 
 down as well as Blackfriars Bridge, and was too 
 much for Paine. As Mr. Conway beautifully puts 
 it: "But again the Cause arose before him; he 
 must part from all — patent interests, literary 
 leisure, line society — and take the hand of Liberty 
 undowered, but as yet unstained. He must beat 
 his bridge-iron into a key that shall unlock the 
 British Bastille, whose walls he sees steadily closing
 
 THOMAS PAINE 297 
 
 around the people." " Miching mallecho — this 
 means mischief; " and so it proved. 
 
 Burke is responsible for The Rights oj Man. This 
 splendid sentimentalist published his Reflections 
 on the Revolution in France in November, 1790. 
 Paine immediately sat down in the " Angel," IsHpg- 
 ton, and began his reply. He was not unquaHfied 
 to answer Burke; he had fought a good fight 
 between the years 1775 and 1784. Mr. Conway had 
 some ground for his epigram, " Where Burke had 
 dabbled, Paine had dived." There is nothing in 
 The Rights of Man which would now frighten, 
 though some of its expressions might still shock, 
 a lady-in-waiting; but to profess RepubHcanism 
 in 1 791 was no joke, and the book was proclaimed 
 and Paine prosecuted. Acting upon the advice 
 of Wilham Blake (the truly subhme), Paine 
 escaped to France, where he was elected by three 
 departments to a seat in the Convention, and in 
 that Convention he sat from September, 1792, 
 to December, 1793, when he was found quarters 
 in the Luxembourg Prison. 
 
 This invitation to foreigners to take part in the 
 conduct of the French Revolution was surely one 
 of the oddest things that ever happened, but 
 Paine thought it natural enough so far, at least, 
 as he was concerned. He could not speak a word 
 of French, and all his harangues had to be trans- 
 lated and read to the Convention by a secretary, 
 whilst Thomas stood smirking in the Tribune. 
 His behaviour throughout was most creditable to 
 him. He acted with the Girondists, and strongly 
 opposed and voted against the murder of the King. 
 His notion of a revolution was one by pamphlet,
 
 298 THOMAS PAINE 
 
 and he shrank from deeds of blood. His whole 
 position was false and ridiculous. He really counted 
 for nothing. The members of the Convention grew 
 tired of his doctrinaire harangues, which, in fact, 
 bored them not a little; but they respected his 
 enthusiasm and the part he had played in America, 
 whither they would gladly he had returned. Who 
 put him in prison is a mystery. Mr. Conway thinks 
 it was the American Minister in Paris, Gouverneur 
 Morris. He escaped the guillotine, and was set 
 free after ten months' confinement. 
 
 All this time Washington had not moved a 
 finger in behalf of the author of Common-sense 
 and The Crisis. Amongst Paine's papers this 
 epigram was found: 
 
 Advice to the Statuary who is to execute the 
 Statue oi'- Washington 
 
 Take from the mine the coldest, hardest stone; 
 It needs no fashion — it is Washington. 
 But if you chisel, let the stroke be rude. 
 And on his heart engrave — " Ingratitude." 
 
 This is hard hitting. 
 
 So far we have only had the Republican Paine, 
 the outlaw Paine; the atheist Paine has not 
 appeared. He did so in The Age of Reason^ first 
 published in 1794-1795. The object of this book 
 was religious. Paine was a vehement believer 
 in God and in the Divine government of the world, 
 but he was not, to put it mildly, a Bible Christian. 
 Nobody now is ever likely to read The Age of 
 Reason for instruction or amusement. Who now 
 reads even Mr. Greg's Creed of Christendom., which 
 is, in effect, though not in substance, the same 
 kind of book ? Paine was a coarse writer, without
 
 THOMAS PAINE 299 
 
 refinement of nature, and he used brutal expres- 
 sions and hurled his vulgar words about in a 
 manner certain to displease. Still, despite it all. 
 The Age of Reason is a religious book, though a 
 singularly unattractive one. 
 
 Paine remained in France advocating all kinds 
 of things, including a descent on England, the 
 abduction of the Royal Family, and a Free Con- 
 stitution. Napoleon sought him out, and assured 
 him that he (Napoleon) slept with The Rights oj 
 Man under his pillow. Paine believed him. 
 
 In 1802 Paine returned to America, after fifteen 
 years' absence. 
 
 " Thou stricken friend of man," exclaims Mr. 
 Conway in a fine passage, " who hast appealed 
 from the God of Wrath to the God of Humanity, 
 see in the distance that Maryland coast which 
 early voyagers called Avalon, and sing again your 
 song when first stepping on that shore twenty- 
 seven years ago." 
 
 The rest of Paine's life was spent in America 
 without distinction or much happiness. He con- 
 tinued writing to the last, and died bravely on 
 the morning of June 8th, 1809. 
 
 The Americans did not appreciate Paine's 
 theology, and in 18 19 allowed Cobbett to carry 
 the bones of the author of Common -sense to 
 England, where — "as rare things will," so, at least, 
 Mr. Browning sings — they vanished. Nobody 
 knows what has become of them. 
 
 As a writer Paine has no merits of a lasting 
 character, but he had a marvellous journalistic 
 knack for inventing names and headings. He is 
 believed to have concocted the two phrases " The
 
 300 THOMAS PAINE 
 
 United States of America " and " The Religion 
 of Humanity." Considering how httle he had read, 
 his discourses on the theory of government are 
 wonderful, and his views generally were almost 
 invariably liberal, sensible, and humane. What 
 ruined him was an intolerable self-conceit, which 
 led him to believe that his own productions super- 
 seded those of other men. He knew off by heart, 
 and was fond of repeating, his own Common-sense 
 and The Rights of Man. He was destitute of the 
 spirit of research, and was wholly without one 
 shred of humility. He was an oddity, a character, 
 but he never took the first step towards becoming 
 a great man.
 
 JOHN WESLEY 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 IN ENGLAND 
 
 1902 
 
 IT was a fortunate thing for historians, moralists, 
 philosophers, and every other kind of book- 
 maker when it became the habit to chop up 
 the annals of mankind into centuries. It is a 
 meaningless division save for the purpose of count- 
 ing, and yet such is our passion for generalisation, 
 so fond are we of distinguishing and differentiating, 
 that we all of us have long ago endowed each one 
 of the nineteen Christian centuries (to wander back 
 no farther) with its own characteristics and attri- 
 butes. These arbitrary divisions of time have thus 
 become sober realities; they stalk majestically 
 across the stage of memory, they tread the boards 
 each in its own garb, making appropriate gestures 
 and uttering familiar catch-words. Lord Claren- 
 don's History is not more unlike Gibbon's, Bishop 
 Ken is not more unHke Bishop Hoadly, Prince 
 Rupert is not more unlike John Churchill, than is 
 the seventeenth century as we choose to depict it 
 unhke the eighteenth. And yet full well do we 
 know in the bottom of our hearts, those unpleasing 
 depths where we seldom dredge for fear of the 
 consequences, how impossible it is to compress 
 into the lines of a single figure, however animated 
 its countenance or mobile its features, the vast 
 
 301
 
 302 JOHN WESLEY 
 
 tide of human existence as it flows gigantically 
 along regardless of methods of counting time. 
 
 The eighteenth century in England does not lack 
 its historians and painters who have treated their 
 great subject sometimes after a Pre-Raphaelite 
 fashion, and sometimes after the manner of the 
 impressionists. It has been loaded with abuse by 
 picturesque historians and high-flying divines and 
 romantic poets. Its political franchise was cer- 
 tainly restricted, while its civil list was unduly 
 extended. It whitewashed its churches, and even 
 sought to rationalise its religion. No less emanci- 
 pated an intelligence than Mark Pattison's pro- 
 nounced the first half of the eighteenth century to 
 be " an age destitute of faith and earnestness — an 
 age whose poetry was without romance, whose 
 philosophy was without insight, and whose public 
 men were without character." Harsh words indeed, 
 but not lightly written. 
 
 Yet when abandoning generalities and dwelling 
 on the details of the time as it was then spent in 
 England, it is difficult to reconcile all one's reading 
 with any very sweeping assertions. It was a brutal 
 age, no doubt — an age of the press-gang, of the 
 whipping-post, of gaol-fever, and all the horrors of 
 the criminal code; an ignorant age, when the 
 population, lords and louts alike, drank with great 
 freedom and reckoned cock-fighting among the 
 more innocent joys of life; when education of 
 the kind called popular, or, more correctly, primary 
 — for popular it is not and never will be — was 
 hardly thought of; a corrupt age, when offices 
 and votes were bought and sold, and bishops owed 
 their sees to the King's women.
 
 JOHN WESLEY 303 
 
 Brutal, ignorant, and corrupt. That the eigh- 
 teenth century in England was all this, is it not 
 written in the storied page of Hogarth ? Charles 
 Lamb quotes with critical approval the answer of 
 the man who, when asked to name his favourite 
 author, replied: " Next to Shakespeare, Hogarth." 
 We all love a crowded gallery — people coming, 
 going, incidents, emotions, passions evil as well as 
 good, for there is nothing we cannot forgive 
 humanity — and Hogarth's gallery teems with the 
 life of the eighteenth century; catches, as only 
 great painters can, its most evanescent glances, 
 and records its desperate efforts to amuse itself 
 or forget itself between two eternities. And though 
 so true a humorist could not be oblivious of the 
 kindly side of life or be without some gracious 
 touches and affectionate portrayals, still, roughly 
 speaking, the great historian of the eighteenth 
 century in England afhrms the brutal view of it, 
 its cruelty, its horror. How people can frame 
 Hogarth's prints and hang them up in their rooms 
 is more than I can say. 
 
 But there are other authorities, other aspects, 
 other books. Two of the catchwords of the eigh- 
 teenth century are sentimentality and enthusiasm. 
 The first of the two is supposed to have been 
 invented by the famous author of the History of 
 Clarissa Harlowe, a Series of Letters. He it was, 
 that Httle printer and warden of a city company, 
 who first opened the rusty floodgates of English 
 tears and taught the South Briton how to weep 
 as he had never wept before. But it is with enthu- 
 siasm I would deal to-day. During the eighteenth
 
 304 JOHN WESLEY 
 
 century enthusiasm is a word of almost as frequent 
 occurrence as either wit or parts. It has been 
 pointed out by an ingenious friend of my own 
 that Pope, in his Essay on Criticism, employs the 
 word " wit " forty-seven times and in at least 
 seven different senses; ^ and as for " parts," 
 though the word may be found in Sidney and 
 Spenser, the eighteenth century made it peculiarly 
 its own. But " enthusiasm " is also a very frequent 
 word. Lord Shaftesbury, the third Earl and the 
 author of the Characteristicks before the century 
 was in its teens, wrote his famous Letter Concerning 
 Enthusiasm, in which he is supposed to have said: 
 " Ridicule is the test of truth." He never said so 
 anywhere in so many words, but he gets very near 
 it in this letter in which he describes enthusiasm 
 as one of the dangers of the age, a terrible dis- 
 temper, almost as bad as the small-pox. In the 
 opinion of my lord enthusiasm is a modification 
 of the spleen, having its centre in an ill-regulated 
 religion. True religion, in the opinion of that third 
 Lord Shaftesbury, is based on good humour. He 
 observes in his fashionable way: " 'Tis in adver- 
 sity chiefly or in ill-health, under affliction or 
 disturbance of mind or discomposure of temper, 
 that we have recourse to religion, though in 
 reality we are never so unlit to think of it as at 
 such a dark and heavy hour. We can never be 
 lit to contemplate anything above us when we are 
 in no condition to look into ourselves and calmly 
 examine the temper of our own minds and pas- 
 sions, for then it is we see wrath and fury and 
 
 1 Pope's Essay on Criticism, edited by A. S. West. Cambridge 
 University Prebs, 1S96.
 
 JOHN WESLEY 305 
 
 revenge and terror in the Deity when we are full 
 of disturbances and fears within, and have by 
 suffering and anxiety lost so much of the natural 
 calm and easiness of our temper." 
 
 Thus did the infant century at the very outset 
 of its journey meet, in the shape of this elegant 
 peer, its Mr. Worldly-Wiseman, who, you will 
 remember, in reply to Christian's distracted " I 
 know what I would obtain; it is ease for my 
 heavy burden," observes in the same sense as 
 Shaftesbury, though in homelier language: " But 
 why wilt thou seek for ease in this way, seeing so 
 many dangers attend it, especially since (hadst 
 thou but patience to hear me) I could direct thee 
 to the obtaining of what thou desirest, without 
 the dangers that thou in this way wilt run thyself 
 into — yea, and the remedy is at hand ? Besides I 
 will add that instead of those dangers, thou shalt 
 meet with much safety, friendship, and content." 
 
 Why wilt thou seek for ease in this way when if 
 you will only be good-humoured, sensible, and let 
 the world wag, you will meet with much safety, 
 friendship, and content ? 
 
 All through the eighteenth century, from Lord 
 Shaftesbury at the beginning to Bishop Lavington 
 nearer its close, enthusiasm continued the bete 
 noire of all those decent people who think that as 
 God made the world He should be left alone to 
 mend it. The inherent absurdity of enthusiasm 
 seldom failed to illuminate the good-natured coun- 
 tenance of David Hume with a smile half a philo- 
 sopher's and half a man of the world's, while it 
 provoked a not ill-natured sneer from Gibbon, who, 
 though he wrote the history of the fall of the 
 I u
 
 3o6 JOHN WESLEY 
 
 Roman Empire was taken quite by surprise, and, 
 indeed, terribly put out, by the fall of the French 
 monarchy in his own day. He, while referring to 
 the author of A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy 
 Life, one of the most characteristic books of the 
 eighteenth century, observes in that way of his 
 so suggestive of a snug corner and a library chair : 
 " Had not Law's vigorous mind been clouded by 
 enthusiasm, he might be ranked with the most 
 agreeable and ingenious writers of his time." 
 Devoutness, holiness, the inward life, the flight 
 from wrath to come, the horror of sin, the inspira- 
 tion of the Holy Spirit, raptures, transports, 
 fancies, visions, voices — all these things and more 
 are included in that word " enthusiasm," which 
 is for ever cropping up in this eighteenth century, 
 the reason being that the century was full of it, 
 and during its years countless thousands of pil- 
 grims not only played the fool in Vanity Fair and 
 made beasts of themselves in Gin Lane, but with 
 groans and trembling passed through the Valley 
 of the Shadow of Death, and caught glimpses of 
 the towers and palaces of the city of God. 
 
 We have too few books which bring home to us 
 in concrete form the lives and thoughts of our 
 forefathers. Historians we know, good, bad, and 
 indifferent, the learned but dull, the dull but con- 
 scientious, the picturesque but false; the historian 
 who writes his history because he has a grudge 
 against the Church of England, whose Orders he 
 has renounced; his Anglican rival, who writes his 
 because he resents as a personal affront the attitude 
 of the Church of Rome to the English branch; the 
 Nonconformist historian, who has his quarrel both
 
 JOHN WESLEY 307 
 
 with the Vatican and Lambeth, and is better read 
 in his Calamy's Nonconformist Memorial than in 
 his Walker's Sufferings of the Clergy. They all 
 have their value, these historians, and their vogue. 
 Gladly do I give them place. But they none of 
 them supply us with what we want. Suppose, for 
 example, I want to be infected with the learning 
 and the leisure of the eighteenth century: the 
 generalisations of the regular historian are of no 
 use to me. Their pages contain no microbes, distil 
 no perfumes. If Mr. Austin Dobson's poems are 
 by my side or his prose studies, they will for a 
 brief season lay me low; but a resurrectionary 
 tour de force has never the reposeful air of Nature. 
 For such a purpose as I have just indicated there 
 is nothing quite so good as the seventeen volumes 
 of Nichols's Anecdotes and Literary History of the 
 Eighteenth Century. In a sense, and a very real 
 sense, too, these portly tomes may be called utterly 
 insignificant. They rarely recall a name of first- 
 class importance or record a fact in itself worth 
 mentioning. They force you to spend your time 
 in the company of historians, not of empires, but 
 of counties, of typographers, antiquaries, classical 
 scholars, lettered divines, librarians at great houses, 
 learned tradesmen (for such freaks existed in the 
 eighteenth century) ; they tell you of lives wasted 
 in colleges and country rectories; they remind 
 you of forgotten controversies and foolish personal 
 enmities; they are full of Latin epitaphs. And 
 every now and again in your country wanderings 
 the originals of these epitaphs will stare at you 
 from some snug transept corner, or meet your eye 
 as you wander westward down the nave of an
 
 3o8 JOHN WESLEY 
 
 abbey church or other old-world burying-place. 
 You will not be troubled with enthusiasm in Mr. 
 Nichols's collections, but to read them is to live in 
 the eighteenth century. In sundry moods they 
 will serve your turn well enough, but the reaction 
 must come, when you will grow impatient of all 
 this trifling, and demand to be quit of tiresome 
 coteries and tenth-rate literature, and to be 
 admitted into the life of the nation. Then, if 
 you are wise, you will carefully replace Mr, Nichols 
 on the shelf (for it is childish to knock books about, 
 and the mood will recur), and take down The 
 Journal of the Reverend John Wesley^ A.M., some- 
 time Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. 
 
 John Wesley, born as he was in 1703, and dying 
 as he did in 1 791, covers as nearly as mortal man 
 may the whole of the eighteenth century, of which 
 he was one of the most typical figures, and cer- 
 tainly the most strenuous. He began his published 
 Journal on October 14th, 1735, and its last entry is 
 under date Sunday, October 24th, 1790, when in the 
 morning he explained to a numerous congregation 
 in Spitalfields Church " The Whole Armour of 
 God," and in the afternoon enforced to a still 
 larger audience in St. Paul's, Shadwell, the great 
 truth, " One thing is needful," the last words of 
 the Journal being: " I hope many even then 
 resolved to choose the better part." 
 
 Between those two Octobers there lies the most 
 amazing record of human exertion ever penned or 
 endured. I do not know whether I am likely to 
 have among my readers anyone who has ever 
 contested an English or Scotch county in a Parlia-
 
 JOHN WESLEY 309 
 
 mentary Election since household suffrage. If I 
 have, that tired soul will know how severe is the 
 strain of its three weeks, and how impossible it 
 seemed at the end of the first week that you should 
 be able to keep it going for another fortnight, and 
 how when the last night arrived you felt that had 
 the strife been accidentally prolonged another seven 
 days you must have perished by the wayside. 
 Well, John Wesley contested the three kingdoms 
 in the cause of Christ during a campaign which 
 lasted forty years. He did it for the most part on 
 horseback. He paid more turnpikes than any man 
 who ever bestrode a beast. Eight thousand miles 
 was his annual record for many a long year, during 
 each of which he seldom preached less frequently 
 than a thousand times. Had he but preserved his 
 scores at all the inns where he lodged, they would 
 have made by themselves a history of prices. And 
 throughout it all he never knew what depression 
 of spirits meant, though he had much to try him — 
 suits in Chancery and a jealous wife. 
 
 In the course of this unparalleled contest Wesley 
 visited again and again the most out-of-the-way 
 districts, the remotest corners of England — places 
 which to-day lie far removed even from the searcher 
 after the picturesque. Even in 1899, when the map 
 of England looks like a gridiron of railways, none 
 but the sturdiest of pedestrians, the most deter- 
 mined of cyclists, can retrace the steps of Wesley 
 and his horse and stand by the rocks and the 
 natural amphitheatres in Cornwall and Northum- 
 berland, in Lancashire and Berkshire, where he 
 preached his Gospel to the heathen. Exertion 
 so prolonged, enthusiasm so sustained, argues a
 
 310 JOHN WESLEY 
 
 remarkable man, while the organisation he created, 
 the system he founded, the view of life he promul- 
 gated, is still a great fact among us. No other 
 name than Wesley's lies embalmed as his does. 
 Yet he is not a popular figure. Our standard 
 historians — save, indeed, Mr. Lecky — have dis- 
 missed him curtly. The fact is, Wesley puts your 
 ordinary historian out of conceit with himself. 
 How much easier to weave into your page the 
 gossip of Horace Walpole, to enliven it with a 
 heartless jest of George Selwyn's, to make it blush 
 with sad stories of the extravagance of Fox, to 
 embroider it with the rhetoric of Burke, to humanise 
 it with the talk of Johnson, to discuss the rise and 
 fall of administrations, the growth and decay of the 
 constitution, than to follow John Wesley into the 
 streets of Bristol or on to the bleak moors near 
 Burslem, where he met face to face in all their 
 violence, all their ignorance, and all their gener- 
 osity the living men, women, and children who 
 made up the nation! 
 
 It has perhaps also to be admitted that to found 
 great organisations is to build your tomb. A 
 splendid tomb it may be, a veritable sarcophagus, 
 but none the less a tomb. John Wesley's chapels 
 lie a little heavily on John Wesley. Even so do 
 the glories of Rome make us forgetful of the grave 
 in Syria. 
 
 It has been said that Wesley's character lacks 
 charm, that mighty antiseptic. It is not easy to 
 define charm, which is not a catalogue of qualities, 
 but a mixture. Let no one deny charm to Wesley 
 who has not read his Journal. Southey's Life is a 
 dull, almost a stupid, book, which happily there is
 
 JOHN WESLEY 311 
 
 no need to read. Read the Journal, which is a 
 book full of plots and plays and novels, which 
 quivers with life, and is crammed full of character. 
 
 John Wesley came of a stock which had been 
 much harassed and put about by our unhappy 
 religious difficulties. Politics, business, and reli- 
 gion are the three things Englishmen are said to 
 worry themselves about. The Wesleys early took 
 up with religion. John Wesley's great-grandfather 
 and grandfather were both ejected from their 
 livings in 1662, and the grandfather was so bullied 
 and oppressed by the Five Mile Act that he early 
 gave up the ghost, whereupon his remains were 
 refused what is called Christian burial, though a 
 holier and more primitive man never drew breath. 
 This poor persecuted spirit left two sons according 
 to the flesh, Matthew and Samuel; and Samuel 
 it was who in his turn became the father of John 
 and Charles Wesley. 
 
 Samuel Wesley, though minded to share the lot, 
 hard though that lot was, of his progenitors, had 
 the moderation of mind, the Christian conservatism, 
 perhaps even the disposition to Toryism, which 
 marked the family, and being sent to a Dissenting 
 college, became disgusted with the ferocity and 
 bigotry he happened there to encounter. Those 
 were the days of the Calf's Head Club and feastings 
 on the 29th of January, graceless meals for which 
 Samuel Wesley had no stomach. His turn was 
 for the things that are " quiet, wise and good." 
 He departed from the Dissenting seminary, and 
 in 1685 entered himself as a poor scholar at Exeter 
 College, Oxford. He brought [2 6s. with him, and 
 as for prospects, he had none. Exeter received
 
 312 JOHN WESLEY 
 
 him. During the eighteenth century our two 
 Universities, famous despite their faults, were 
 always open to the poor scholar who was ready 
 to subscribe, not to boat clubs or cricket clubs, 
 but to the Thirty-nine Articles. Three Archbishops 
 of Canterbury during the eighteenth century were 
 the sons of small tradesmen. There was, in fact, 
 much less snobbery and money-worship during the 
 century when the British Empire was being won 
 than during the century when it is being talked 
 about. Samuel Wesley was allowed to remain at 
 Oxford, where he supported himself by devices 
 known to his tribe, and when he left the University 
 to be ordained he had clear in his pouch, after 
 discharging his few debts, ^^lo 15s. He had thus 
 made (j 19s. out of his University, and had his 
 education, as it were, thrown in for nothing. He 
 soon obtained a curacy in London, and married 
 a daughter of the well-known ejected clergyman. 
 Dr. Annesley, about whom you may read in another 
 eighteenth-century book, 7 he Life and Errors of 
 John Dunton. 
 
 The mother of the Wesleys was a remarkable 
 woman, though cast in a mould not much to our 
 minds nowadays. She had nineteen children, and 
 greatly prided herself on having taught them, one 
 after another, by frequent chastisements, to — what 
 do you think ? — cry softly. She had theories of 
 education, and strength of will and of arm, too, 
 to carry them out. She knew Latin and Greek, and 
 though a stern, forbidding, almost an unfeehng 
 parent, she was successful in winning and retaining, 
 not only the respect, but the affection of such of 
 her huge family as lived to grow up. But out of
 
 JOHN WESLEY 313 
 
 the nineteen thirteen early succumbed. Infant 
 mortaHty was one of the great facts of the eigh- 
 teenth century, whose Rachels had to learn to cry 
 softly over their dead babes. The mother of the 
 Wesleys thought more of her children's souls than 
 of their bodies. 
 
 The revolution of 1688 threatened to disturb 
 the early married life of Samuel Wesley and his 
 spouse. The husband wrote a pamphlet in which 
 he defended revolution principles, but the wife 
 secretly adhered to the old cause; nor was it until 
 a year before Dutch William's death that the 
 Rector made the discovery that the wife of his 
 bosom, who had sworn to obey him and regard 
 him as her overlord, was not in the habit of saying 
 " Amen " to his fervent prayers on behalf of his 
 suffering Sovereign. An explanation was demanded 
 and the truth extracted, namely, that in the 
 opinion of the Rector's wife her true King lived 
 over the water. The Rector at once refused to 
 live with Mrs. Wesley any longer until she re- 
 canted. This she refused to do, and for a twelve- 
 month the couple dwelt apart, when William III. 
 having the good sense to die, a reconciliation 
 became possible. If John Wesley was occasionally 
 a little pig-headed, need one wonder ? The story 
 of the fire at Epworth Rectory and the miraculous 
 escape of the infant John was once a tale as well 
 known as Alfred in the neat-herd's hut, and 
 pictures of it still hang up in many a colher's home. 
 
 John Wesley received a sound classical education 
 at Charterhouse and Christ Church, and remained 
 all his life very much the scholar and the gentle- 
 man. No company was too good for John Wesley,
 
 314 JOHN WESLEY 
 
 and nobody knew better than he did that had he 
 cared to carry his powerful intelligence, his flaw- 
 less constitution, and his infinite capacity for 
 taking pains into any of the markets of the 
 world, he must have earned for himself place, 
 fame, and fortune. 
 
 Coming, however, as he did of a theological 
 stock, having a saint for a father and a notable 
 devout woman for a mother, Wesley from his early 
 days learned to regard religion as the business of 
 his life, just as the younger Pitt came to regard 
 the House of Commons as the future theatre ot 
 his actions. After a good deal of heart-searching 
 and theological talk with his mother, Wesley was 
 ordained a deacon by the excellent Potter, after- 
 ward Primate, but then (1725) Bishop of Oxford. 
 In the following year Wesley was elected a Fellow 
 of Lincoln, to the great delight of his father. 
 " Whatever I am," said the good old man, " my 
 Jack is Fellow of Lincoln." 
 
 In trying to form even a glimmering idea of the 
 state of the Church of England in 1725, when 
 Wesley took Orders, there are some incidents in 
 its past history which must not be overlooked. 
 I mean its repeated purgings. Evictions are of 
 course, of frequent occurrence in all Church his- 
 tories, but the Church of England has been pecu- 
 liarly unlucky in this respect. Let me, in a handful 
 of sentences, recall the facts. I pass over the 
 puzzling and unedifying events of King Henry 
 VIII. 's time, the Protestant rule of his short-lived 
 son, the frank Romanism of his eldest daughter, 
 and begin with EHzabeth, who succeeded in Novem- 
 ber, 1558. Crowned though she was according to
 
 JOHN WESLEY 315 
 
 the Catholic ceremonial, including the unction and 
 the Pontifical Mass, it appears to have been well 
 understood by those in high place that England, 
 having got a new master, must be prepared once 
 more for new men and new measures. They were 
 indeed strange times. Can it be that the country 
 did not care about the continuity of its Church ? 
 The Act of Supremacy soon made its appearance, 
 annexing to the Crown all jurisdictions, spiritual 
 and ecclesiastical, for the visitation and reforma- 
 tion of the ecclesiastical state and persons, and of 
 all errors, heresies, and schisms. The inevitable 
 oath was directed to be taken under the usual 
 penalties — first, loss of property, then loss of life. 
 When Queen Mary died there were but fifteen 
 Anglican Bishops alive. Of these, fourteen refused 
 the oath, and were turned neck-and-crop out of 
 their sees. They went away quickly enough, and 
 disappeared into obscurity. EHzabeth called them 
 a lazy set of scamps. W^e have no evidence that 
 they were anything of the kind. Hardships and 
 indignities were heaped upon them. Some died 
 in prison, others in retirement; one or two escaped 
 abroad. It seems to be the fact that they all died 
 in their beds. They had no mind either to burn or 
 hang. Jeremy Collier gives us, in addition to those 
 fourteen prelates, a list of three bishops-elect, one 
 abbot, one abbess, four priors, twelve deans, four- 
 teen archdeacons, sixty canons, one hundred priests, 
 all well preferred, fifteen heads of colleges, and 
 about twenty doctors of both faculties — all what 
 one may call stationary people hard to move, who 
 were at this same time deprived of their places, 
 profits, and dignities. It docs not seem a great
 
 3i6 JOHN WESLEY 
 
 many out of the nine thousand spiritual places 
 in England. Still, to lose its whole hierarchy 
 (except the Bishop of Llandaff) at one blow was 
 a shrewd knock, nor, we may be sure, did the 
 bishops-elect, the deans, the archdeacons and 
 canons, the heads of houses and doctors of divinity, 
 and the one hundred well-preferred priests go out 
 without rendings of the heart and bitter reflections. 
 There were no newspapers to record their emotions 
 or to summarise their losses under the heading 
 " Crisis in the Church "; but we may be sure they 
 were pious men, sick of shuffles and crowned heads, 
 while of those who remained, who can tell with 
 what uneasiness of mind, with what pangs of 
 conscience, they did so ? 
 
 This is Purge No. i, and it got rid of the old 
 Roman pietist; and let no man deny to the 
 Church of Rome one of the notes of a true Church 
 — the capacity to breed saints. 
 
 Purge No. 2 was numerically more important. 
 Charles I. got into those difficulties which brought 
 his comely head to the scaffold, and the beneficed 
 clergy were made subject to visitation by order of 
 the House of Commons and in large numbers 
 turned adrift. That many of these clergy were 
 illiterate and unfit for their office is true enough, 
 but in the teeth of the protests made by the best 
 men among the Puritan party, other tests than 
 those of learning and piety were imposed and 
 enforced. Loyalty to the dead king, or malignancy 
 as it was termed, was counted to be a disqualifica- 
 tion for a country parson; a sour observance of 
 Sunday was reckoned as piety, and many a good 
 man who had earned and deserved the love of his
 
 JOHN WESLEY 317 
 
 parishioners was evicted to make way for a Pres- 
 byterian. How many parsons were turned out 
 during the Commonwealth it is hard to say, but 
 many hundreds there certainly were, and among 
 them were numbered some of the very choicest 
 spirits of the age. 
 
 Purge No. 3 is the one best known in Noncon- 
 formist circles. It occurred after the restoration 
 of the Stuarts, when two thousand of the clergy, 
 including a large number of the intruders of the 
 Commonwealth, were turned out of their livings 
 for refusing to take the oath required by the Act 
 of Uniformity. The celebrated Richard Baxter 
 (who refused a bishopric) tells us in his Life, which 
 is one of the best books in existence, how these 
 evicted tenants were made up. The passage is too 
 long to be here quoted, and it is enough to say 
 that by this purge the Church of England lost a 
 host of her clergy who had no objection to Bishops 
 or to a Liturgy, who had never signed the Solemn 
 League and Covenant, who had been against the 
 Civil War, but who were unwilling, because unable, 
 to give their unfeigned assent and consent to all 
 and everything contained in the Book of Common 
 Prayer. But they had to go. They were devout, 
 they were learned, they were peaceful, they were 
 sensible. It mattered not; out they went like 
 Wesley's own grandfather, and were hunted from 
 place to place like wolves. 
 
 Purge No. 4 has still to be endured. The Stuarts 
 ran their destined course. The blessed restoration 
 was in less than thirty years succeeded by the 
 glorious revolution, and a fresh oath had, of 
 course, to be invented as a burden upon the
 
 3i8 JOHN WESLEY 
 
 conscience of the established clergy. It was in 
 form simple enough: " I, A. B., do sincerely 
 promise and swear to bear true allegiance to their 
 Majesties King William and Queen Mary." But 
 to appreciate its horrid significance, we must re- 
 member that the now mouldy doctrines of " Divine 
 right " and " passive obedience " were then as 
 much the talk of the clergy of the Church of 
 England as incense, lights, and the sacramental 
 theory are to-day. The books and pamphlets on 
 these subjects may still be counted, though hardly 
 read, in thousands. The Archbishop of Canterbury 
 (Dr. Sancroft) and five of his brethren, including 
 Bishop Ken, were deprived of their sees, and at 
 least four hundred divines followed them into 
 exile. These were the non-jurors, men of fabulous 
 learning and primitive piety, who added evan- 
 gelical fervour and simplicity to High Church 
 doctrine. To read the lives of these men is to live 
 among the saints and doctors, and their expulsion 
 from the Church they alone loved and they alone 
 could properly defend diverted into alien channels 
 the very qualities we find so sorely lacking in the 
 Anglican Church of the eighteenth century. How 
 absurd to grumble at the Hoadlys and Watsons, 
 the Hurds and the Warburtons! They were all 
 that was left. Faith and fervour, primitive piety, 
 Puritan zeal, Catholic devotion — each in its turn 
 had been decimated and cast out. What a history 
 it is! Whether you read it in the Roman page of 
 Lingard and Dodd and Morris, or in the Anglican 
 record of Collier, or turn over the biographies to 
 be found in our old friends Walker and Calamy, 
 what can you do but hold up your hands in horror
 
 JOHN WESLEY 319 
 
 and amazement ? Wherever and whenever there 
 was goodness, piety, faith, devotion, out it had to 
 go. It was indeed as into a dungeon, stripped, 
 swept, and bare, that the Church of England 
 stepped at the revolution, and in that dungeon 
 she lay for a hundred years. Since then many 
 things have happened. There has been a revival 
 of faith and fervour in the Church of England, so 
 much so that Purge No. 5 may shortly be expected. 
 The reason why I have dwelt at great length on 
 these facts of Church history is because we should 
 have them in mind if we are to understand what 
 may be called the status quo ante bellum John 
 Wesley waged with the Devil in Great Britain. 
 
 Wesley's motive never eludes us. Id his early 
 manhood, after being greatly affected by Jeremy 
 Taylor's Floly Living and Dying and the Imitatio 
 Christi, and by Law's Serious Call and Christian 
 Perfection^ he met " a serious man," who said to 
 him: " Sir, you wish to serve God and go to 
 heaven. Remember, you cannot serve Him alone. 
 You must therefore find companions or make them. 
 The Bible knows nothing of solitary religion." He 
 was very confident, this serious man, and Wesley 
 never forgot his message : " You must find com- 
 panions or make them. The Bible knows nothing 
 of solitary religion." These words for ever sounded 
 in Wesley's ears, determining his theology, which 
 rejected the stern individualism of Calvin, and 
 fashioning his whole polity, his famous class 
 meetings and generally gregarious methods. 
 
 Therefore to him it was given 
 Many to save with himself.
 
 320 JOHN WESLEY 
 
 We may continue the quotation and apply to 
 
 Wesley the words of Mr. Arnold's memorial to 
 
 his father: 
 
 Languor was not in his heart. 
 Weakness not in his word. 
 Weariness not on his brow. 
 
 If you ask what is the impression left upon the 
 reader of the Journals as to the condition of Eng- 
 land question, the answer will vary very much 
 with the tenderness of the reader's conscience and 
 with the extent of his acquaintance with the 
 general behaviour of mankind at all times and in 
 all places. Wesley himself is no alarmist, no sen- 
 timentalist; he never gushes, seldom exaggerates, 
 and always writes on an easy level. Naturall) 
 enough he clings to the supernatural, and is always 
 disposed to believe in the bona fides of ghosts and 
 the diabolical origin of strange noises; but outside 
 this realm of speculation Wesley describes things 
 as he saw them. In the first published words of 
 his friend Dr. Johnson, " he meets with no basilisks 
 that destroy with their eyes, his crocodiles devour 
 their prey without tears, and his cataracts fall 
 from the rocks without deafening the neighbouring 
 inhabitants." 
 
 Wesley's humour is of the species donnish, and 
 his modes and methods quietly persistent. 
 
 On Thursday, the 20th May (1742), I set out. The next 
 afternoon I stopped a Httle at Newport-Pagnell, and then 
 rode on till I overtook a serious man, with whom I immediately 
 fell into conversation. He presently gave me to know what 
 his opinions were, therefore I said nothing to contradict 
 them. But that did not content him. He was quite uneasy 
 to know " whether I held the doctrines of the decrees as he 
 did "; but I told him over and over: " We had better keep 
 to practical things, lest we should be angry at one another."
 
 JOHN WESLEY 321 
 
 And so we did for two miles, till he caught me unawares, 
 and dragged me into the dispute before I knew where I was. 
 He then grew warmer and warmer; told me I was rotten at 
 heart, and supposed I was one of John Wesley's followers. 
 I told him " No. I am John Wesley himself." Upon which — 
 
 " Improvisum aspris veluti qui sentibus anguem 
 Presset " — 
 
 he would gladly have run away outright, but being the 
 better mounted of the two I kept close to his side, and 
 endeavoured to show him his heart till we came into the 
 street of Northampton. 
 
 What a picture have we here of a fine May 
 morning in 1742, the unhappy Calvinist trying to 
 shake off the Arminian Wesley! But he cannot do 
 it. John Wesley is the better mounted of the two, and 
 so they scamper together into Northampton. 
 
 The England described in the Journal is an 
 England still full of theology. All kinds of queer 
 folk abound; strange subjects are discussed in 
 odd places. There was drunkenness and cock- 
 fighting, no doubt, but there were also Deists, 
 Mystics, Swedenborgians, Antinomians, Necessi- 
 tarians, Anabaptists, Quakers, nascent heresies, 
 and slow-dying delusions. Villages were divided 
 into rival groups, which fiercely argued the nicest 
 points in the aptest language. Nowadays in one's 
 rambles a man is as likely to encounter a grey 
 badger as a black Calvinist. 
 
 The clergy of the Established Church were 
 jealous of Wesley's interference in their parishes, 
 nor was this unnatural; he was not a Noncon- 
 formist, but a brother Churchman. What right 
 had he to be so peripatetic ? But Wesley seldom 
 records any instance of gross clerical misconduct. 
 Of one drunken parson he does indeed tell us, and 
 he speaks disapprovingly of another whom he 
 
 I X
 
 322 JOHN WESLEY 
 
 found one very hot day consuming a pot of beer 
 in a lone alehouse. I am bound to confess I have 
 never had any but kindly feelings toward that 
 thirsty ecclesiastic. What, I wonder, was he think- 
 ing of as Wesley rode by ? Meditations Libres (Tun 
 Solitaire Inconnu^ — unpublished ! 
 
 When Wesley, with that dauntless courage of 
 his^ — 3i courage which never forsook him, which he 
 wore on every occasion with the delightful ease 
 of a soldier' — pushed his way into fierce districts, 
 amid rough miners dwelling in their own village 
 communities almost outside the law, what most 
 strikes one with admiration, not less in Wesley's 
 Journal than in George Fox's (a kindred though 
 earlier volume), is the essential fitness for freedom 
 of our rudest populations. They were coarse and 
 brutal and savage, but rarely did they fail to 
 recognise the high character and lofty motives of 
 the dignified mortal who had travelled so far to 
 speak to them. Wesley was occasionally hustled, 
 and once or twice pelted with mud and stones, but 
 at no time were his sufferings at the hands of the 
 mob to be compared with the indignities it was 
 long the fashion to heap upon the heads of Parlia- 
 mentary candidates. The mob knew and appre- 
 ciated the difference between a Bubb Dodington 
 and a John Wesley. 
 
 I do not think any ordinary Englishman will be 
 much horrified at the demeanour of the populace. 
 If there was disturbance it was usually quelled. 
 At Norwich two soldiers who disturbed a congre- 
 gation were seized and carried before their com- 
 manding officer, who ordered them to be soundly 
 whipped. In Wesley's opinion they richly deserved
 
 JOHN WESLEY 323 
 
 all they got. He was no sentimentalist, although 
 an enthusiast. 
 
 Where the reader of the Journal will be shocked 
 is when his attention is called to the pubhc side of 
 the country — to the state of the gaols, to Newgate, 
 to Bethlehem, to the criminal code, to the brutality 
 of so many of the judges and the harshness of the 
 magistrates, to the supineness of the bishops, to 
 the extinction in high places of the missionary 
 spirit — in short, to the heavy slumb' r of humanity. 
 
 Wesley was full of compassion — of a compassion 
 wholly free from hysterics and credulity. In public 
 affairs his was the composed zeal of a Howard. His 
 efforts to penetrate the dark places were long in 
 vain. He says in his dry way: " They won't let 
 me go to Bedlam because they say I make the 
 inmates mad, or into Newgate because I make 
 them wicked." The reader of the Journal will be 
 at no loss to see what these sapient magistrates 
 meant. Wesley was a terribly exciting preacher, 
 quiet though his manner was. He pushed matters 
 home without flinching. He made people cry out 
 and fall down, nor did it surprise him that they 
 should. You will find some strange biographies 
 in the Journal. Consider that of John Lancaster 
 for a moment. He was a young fellow who fell 
 into bad company, stole some velvet, and was 
 sentenced to death, and lay for awhile in Newgate 
 awaiting his hour. A good Methodist woman, 
 Sarah Peters, obtained permission to visit him, 
 though the fever was raging in the prison at the 
 time. Lancaster had no difficulty in collecting six 
 or seven other prisoners, all like himself waiting 
 to be strangled, and Sarah Peters prayed with
 
 324 JOHN WESLEY 
 
 them and sang hymns, the clergy of the diocese 
 being otherwise occupied. When the eve of their 
 execution arrived, the poor creatures begged that 
 Sarah Peters might be allowed to remain with 
 them to continue her exhortations; but this could 
 not be. In her absence, however, they contrived 
 to console one another, for that devilish device of 
 a later age, solitary confinement, was then un- 
 known. When the bellman came round at mid- 
 night to tell them, " Remember you are to die 
 to-day," they cried out: "Welcome news — wel- 
 come news! " How they met their deaths you can 
 read for yourselves in the Journal, which concludes 
 the narrative with a true eighteenth-century touch : 
 " John Lancaster's body was carried away by a 
 company hired by the surgeons, but a crew of 
 sailors pursued them, took it from them by force, 
 and delivered it to his mother, by which means it 
 was decently interred in the presence of many 
 who praised God on his behalf." 
 
 If you want to get into the last century, to feel 
 its pulses throb beneath your finger, be content 
 sometimes to leave the letters of Horace Walpole 
 unturned, resist the drowsy temptation to waste 
 your time over the learned triflers who sleep in 
 the seventeen volumes of Nichols — nay, even deny 
 yourself your annual reading of Boswell or your 
 biennial retreat with Sterne, and ride up and down 
 the country with the greatest force of the eighteenth 
 century in England. 
 
 No man lived nearer the centre than John 
 Wesley, neither Clive nor Pitt, neither Mansfield 
 nor Johnson. You cannot cut him out of our 
 national life. No single figure influenced so many
 
 JOHN WESLEY 325 
 
 minds, no single voice touched so many hearts. 
 No other man did such a life's work for England. 
 As a writer he has not achieved distinction. He 
 was no Athanasius, no Augustine. He was ever 
 a preacher and an organiser, a labourer in the 
 service of humanity; but, happily for us, his 
 Journals remain, and from them we can learn 
 better than from anywhere else what manner of 
 man he was, and the character of the times during 
 which he lived and moved and had his being.
 
 SIR ROBERT PEEL ' 
 
 1902 
 
 ENGLISH politicians, though of the first 
 rank, must usually be content, like the 
 heroes of the mimic stage, with full houses 
 and loud cheers; with the verdicts of their con- 
 temporaries; the enthusiasm of their supporters; 
 the respect of their opponents; with the loves and 
 hates and jealousies of an active life; the sense of 
 full days and stirring events, of proud moments 
 and realised ambitions. Opportunists they all were, 
 of course, else had they not been British statesmen 
 and pilots in the dark hours. We do not search 
 their memoirs for pregnant sayings, and if we read 
 their speeches at all, Burke's only excepted, it is 
 for purely party purposes, certainly not for intel- 
 lectual profit or aesthetic enjoyment. To survey 
 the comely series of volumes which contain the 
 orations of our great Parliamentary figures from 
 Pitt to Gladstone, is to summon up the same 
 thoughts and to create the same atmosphere of 
 melancholy pleasure, as when in some green-room 
 library you take down from a seldom-visited shelf 
 copies of the old plays in which a Betterton or a 
 Garrick, a Siddons or a Jordan, once took the 
 town by storm. Charles Lamb has moralised on 
 old playbills; old orders of the day might well 
 provoke kindred reflections. 
 
 * From the Contemporary Review. 
 326
 
 SIR ROBERT PEEL 327 
 
 When a great politician dies, a man whose name 
 has been on the tongues of all, and in every kind 
 of type for scores of years, the good-hearted British 
 public makes the matutinal observations, conven- 
 tionally described as " mourning a loss " ; attends 
 his funeral or memorial service, and then, after 
 scratching his name on the Abbey stones or else- 
 where, is well content to leave him alone for ever- 
 more with the epithet or attribute it deems most 
 appropriate to attach to his name. Thus, Pitt is 
 majestic, Fox generous. Canning splendid, Palmer- 
 ston patriotic, John Russell plucky, Disraeli 
 romantic, Gladstone religious; and so on. Nor 
 are these epithets open to revision. Whatever 
 records leap to life they are not in the least likely 
 to be altered. The fact is, Englishmen understand 
 their political leaders from top to toe. They have 
 never mistaken them for saints, heroes, or philo- 
 sophers. Indeed, they know them to be sinners, 
 usually as blind to the future as the grocer down 
 the street, and occasionally as ignorant of the past 
 as the publican at the corner, but who for all that 
 stood like men for their brief hour on the quarter- 
 deck of the big ship, which is still groaning and 
 grunting on its way. At all events, they never 
 ran her aground. 
 
 Sir Robert Peel was born in 1788, in the old 
 world, as one may say. And now, one hundred and 
 eleven years afterwards, in a quite new world, in a 
 country which takes every year from the pockets 
 of its people ^110,000,000 sterling, we are for the 
 first time supplied with the materials necessary for 
 forming what is called an instructed opinion upon 
 his most remarkable public career. Everything is
 
 328 SIR ROBERT PEEL 
 
 placed at our service, all is well arranged and clearly- 
 expressed, nothing seems kept back that relates to 
 a public life ; and yet for the purposes of reviewing 
 contemporary judgments, or of revising the careless 
 tradition of the street, or of enabling us to sit with 
 confidence in the seat of judgment, I do not know 
 that we find ourselves much better off than we 
 were before. Affidavit-evidence is now universallv 
 despised, and to form an opinion of a public man 
 from his memoranda and speeches, is to rely upon 
 the same dead-alive testimony. A good portrait, 
 as Carlyle used to say, is half the battle, but there 
 is no great picture of Peel — the best is the word- 
 portrait of Disraeli. 
 
 The angry passions of 1829 and 1845 have not 
 permanently disfigured the character of Peel. They 
 were fierce enough. Politicians who have lived 
 through the years 1 886-1 894 can have no difficulty 
 in appreciating the fury with which Peel was 
 assailed by Protestant bigotry and Protectionist 
 zeal, or how old friendships (so-called) were 
 severed, and party ties broken. He was fortunate 
 in one respect. Through it all Welhngton stood by 
 his side. It was no doubt hard to hear Sir Edward 
 Knatchbull exclaim " Nusquam tuta fides," almost 
 intolerable to have to submit to the heartless 
 raillery of Disraeh, hardest of all to look into his 
 own heart and know that his ill-timed obstinacy 
 had (perhaps) robbed Canning of what in his hands 
 might have been a glorious triumph, and his well- 
 timed conversion deprived Villiers of what would 
 have been a famous victory. It is, however, the 
 business of politicians to do a good deal of night- 
 poaching, and it is a pardonable weakness to believe
 
 SIR ROBERT PEEL 329 
 
 that an intelligent Providence must have meant you 
 and not gentlemen opposite to save the country. 
 
 Peel entered Parliament for an Irish borough in 
 1809, when he was just of age. Is this a good thing ? 
 Lord Plahfax, the Trimmer, thought not, and in his 
 shrewd hints for the choice of Members of Parlia- 
 ment, gives his reasons. Mr. Gladstone, on the 
 other hand, thought it was. Certainly few men 
 become parliamentary hands quickly. For the 
 business of a statesman ten years is a short appren- 
 ticeship, but it is a good-sized slice out of a life. 
 There seems no very obvious reason why a seat in 
 the House of Commons should either arrest a 
 young man's intellectual development or ossify 
 his imagination, yet if the young man is by the 
 order of his mind slow-moving, prim, frigid and 
 mechanical, if he possesses none of that dangerous 
 but precious acid which dissipates platitudes and 
 disintegrates falsehoods, if he is apt to be a little 
 uncomfortable in the presence of actual fact, but 
 very much at his ease when amplifying and ex- 
 pounding in sonorous periods bookish conceptions 
 and notions; and if to these positive and negative 
 qualities he adds a liking for office and an aptitude 
 for business, then it is that an early adoption of 
 party creeds and party connections and a complete 
 immersion into the affairs of the hour, are certain 
 to impede the free swing of the mind and the full 
 muscular development of a truth-loving inteUigence. 
 
 Robert Peel had an orderly mind, quick to 
 absorb, ready to assimilate, and slow to deny. 
 He never revolted from a lie, but slowly ceased 
 to believe in it. He merely entertained his ideas, 
 and therefore never found it hard to cease to be
 
 330 SIR ROBERT PEEL 
 
 " at home " to any of them. He had none of the 
 mental vehemence of his great pupil, who, none 
 the less, was equally destined to do a great deal 
 of unloading. It has been said of Mr. Gladstone, 
 and with perfect truth, that he was never either 
 a Whig or a Protestant. He arrived at his Liberalism 
 by paths untrodden by the huge hosts of his fol- 
 lowers, who had to be content to cheer the result 
 without studying the process. Peel, like Glad- 
 stone, was brought up among Tories, and received 
 a sound classical education in Tory strongholds, 
 from port-wine dons, and divines bent on being 
 bishops, the very last people in the world to teach 
 their pupils to verify the accepted formulas of 
 Church and State. The remark used often to be 
 made that Peel was sprung from the people. In 
 the already old-fashioned days of which Mr. 
 Samuel Smiles was the popular vates, " the rise 
 of the Peel family " was a favourite subject for 
 the thrifty muse, and there were sentimentalists 
 ready to attribute Sir Robert's genuine devotion 
 to the cause of labour and his fierce desire to 
 cheapen living to his ancestry. But in England, 
 where we are all woven strangely of the same piece, 
 these things count for very little. Between a decent 
 agricultural labourer and a decent duke there are 
 no differences which cannot be easily accounted 
 for by those personal habits which are engendered 
 by their different ways of life. Twenty years in 
 big houses, in labourers' cottages, in merchants' 
 villas, in artisans' dwellings, in Whitechapel tene- 
 ments, will explain all the differences noticeable 
 between the varied ranks of her Majesty's lieges. 
 Peel is said to have had a provincial accent. Of
 
 SIR ROBERT PEEL 331 
 
 the three great Lancashire orators of our own time, 
 Lord Derby, Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Bright, the 
 last alone was spotless in this matter; for a quick 
 Lancastrian ear could easily detect his native 
 accents in the scholarly tones of Gladstone, 
 whilst they flourished unabashed in the manly 
 discourse of the Rupert of debate. The Peel 
 pedigree need not detain us. The gentleman- 
 commoner of Christ Church of 1806 was like the 
 rest of his brethren, except in one fortunate par- 
 ticular. He was the heir to great wealth, not 
 made out of the ownership of the soil. Peel 
 was destined to fight the landed interest, which 
 then sought to throttle the nation, even as his 
 high-spirited son is now engaged in fighting the 
 drink interest, which seeks to throttle us. What 
 made Peel's contest especially bitter was that the 
 wounded country gentlemen had to confess that 
 the pinion that impelled the fatal steel had been 
 nourished in their own nurseries, and been awarded 
 the pet diploma of the greedy monopolist, the 
 representation in Parliament of the University of 
 Oxford. And yet never was statesman more truly 
 conservative in all his mental methods than Sir 
 Robert Peel, whose tortured spirit never sought 
 to escape from the blunt brutalities of the squires, 
 or the poisoned invective of their hired bravo, by 
 the simple expedient of throwing wide open the 
 windows of his mind and letting the free air of 
 heaven sweep through its chambers. The history 
 of the landed interest in England from the date 
 when it plundered the Church of the territories 
 that were intended to be, and often were, the 
 support of the poor and the shelter of the aged, to
 
 332 SIR ROBERT PEEL 
 
 the unhappy hour when it turned a deaf, because 
 a selfish, ear to the report of the Devon Commis- 
 sion, has never yet been written; and to write it 
 now would be, so far as the agricultural interest 
 is concerned, to trample on a poverty-stricken 
 race, who barely contrive to go on existing by 
 avoiding those contributions to the Army and 
 Navy which, under the name of death duties, 
 are levied upon cash values only. 
 
 Insolent in the hour of its prosperity, the landed 
 interest has become mean in more straitened cir- 
 cumstances. But even had its history been com- 
 posed in Peel's time, he would have taken no 
 pleasure in the perusal, so rooted was his love 
 for the order of things as he found them. The 
 conservatism of most men is based on fear and a 
 lively sense of the risks to which all Governments 
 are exposed. The surprising thing is that society 
 should exist at all, and that dividends should go 
 on being paid at the Bank. Any condition of things 
 that has proved itself to be compatible with a 
 social status quo is to be respected by statesmen, 
 and, if possible, revered by the populace. Sobriety, 
 security, and peace were the real objects of Peel's 
 devotion. Had the Dissenters of England been as 
 strong as the Roman Catholics in Ireland, Peel 
 would have disestablished and disendowed the 
 Church of England on the best terms he could 
 get for her, nor would his pillow ever have been 
 haunted by ghosts in lawn. He had a true states- 
 man's horror of enthusiasts and martyrs. So that 
 he might dodge revolution and avoid bloodshed, 
 there were few sacrifices he was not prepared to 
 make. He had not, indeed, reduced the art of
 
 SIR ROBERT PEEL 333 
 
 capitulation to the simple formula of his colleague 
 the Great Duke, who, whenever driven into a 
 corner, was content to put the question, " How is 
 the Government of the King (or Queen) to be 
 carried on ? " and then, having answered it in 
 a particular way, proceeded to repudiate all his 
 former political notes-of-hand with the effrontery 
 of a South American Republic. Peel was a man 
 who intellectualised his apostasies. True it was 
 that he was taught by circumstance, and trod the 
 tortuous paths of party rather than the narrow 
 way of truth; still, he had a mind which, like 
 some plants, instinctively turned to the light. 
 Seriousness has not been a common quality with 
 English Prime Ministers. The light-heartedness of 
 most of them is amazing. Even the horrors of 
 the criminal code have never turned a politician's 
 stomach. Peel was a serious Minister, always, so 
 Mr. Disraeli complained, " absorbed in thought." 
 The Condition of England Question weighed more 
 heavily on the statesman than ever it did on the 
 novelist, although the imaginative genius of the 
 latter enabled him without pain or labour to see 
 deeper into the cauldron than could the former. 
 But Disraeli did nothing for England, Peel saved 
 her. " There was always," said Mr. Disraeli half- 
 contemptuously, " some person representing some 
 theory or system exercising an influence over his 
 mind." Forcible is the retort made by Mr. Thurs- 
 field in his short Life of Peel, the authority of which 
 remains unimpaired by the elaborate publications 
 of Mr. Parker : " To have learned the principles 
 of currencv and finance from Ricardo, Horner and 
 Huskisson, the principles of criminal legislation
 
 334 SIR ROBERT PEEL 
 
 from Romilly and Mackintosh, and the principles 
 of free trade from Villiers and Cobden, was not 
 Peel's reproach but his everlasting honour." 
 
 No statesman of the century has left his mark 
 so plainly inscribed upon both the Statute Book 
 and the life and business of the nation as Sir 
 Robert Peel. He it was who resumed cash pay- 
 ments, established a gold standard, and told us 
 " What is a pound." He was the author of the 
 Bank Charter Act, and of the sweet simplicity of 
 the Three per Cents. We owe it to Sir Robert 
 Peel that the Income Tax is always with us, and 
 that a policeman is, or ought to be, at the corner 
 of every street. The Budgets of 1842 and 1845 
 are chapters in our financial history, for was it 
 not Peel who taught us to fight hostile tariffs with 
 free imports ? Across Ireland the names of most 
 Chief Secretaries are writ in water, but Peel left 
 behind him that constabulary force of which we 
 hear every year when the Irish Estimates come 
 on for discussion. The law reformer loves the name 
 of Peel, who humanised the criminal code, and 
 showed, at least, a wiUingness to listen to the 
 voice of Bentham and to recast our judicature. 
 Finally, he emancipated the Catholics, and carried 
 free trade in corn. Here is a programme indeed, 
 by the side of which that of Newcastle may well 
 pale its ineffectual fires. Yet we are always told 
 there was something sinister about the career of 
 Peel. There is a slouch in the gait of our deliverer. 
 What is it ? It is to be found in Greville's famous 
 maxim, " The Tories only can carry Liberal 
 measures." The men behind Peel cried, " Traitor! " 
 and the men in front of him murmured, " Thief! "
 
 SIR ROBERT PEEL 335 
 
 " The right honourable gentleman's life," said Mr. 
 Disraeli, " has been one vast appropriation clause." 
 
 It was the subsequent boast of Disraeli, himself 
 one of the most light-fingered of the fraternity, 
 that he had educated his party, though what he 
 really thought of the process to which he had 
 subjected them it is better only guessing. Peel 
 could not honestly say that he had educated his 
 party, but as he succeeded in coercing it, no good 
 Liberal will grudge him his splendid record of 
 great achievements or his imperishable fame. In 
 these respects Peel is an exception to the general 
 rule that encompasses departed statesmen in a 
 trailing cloud of forgetfulness. 
 
 Mr. Parker's three capacious volumes ^ enable 
 us to form (if we are sufficiently imaginative and 
 have any knowledge of affairs) an estimate of the 
 great compass of Peel's public interests and his 
 devotion to business. We see Mr. Gladstone's 
 schoolmaster abroad in every page. Peel had a 
 passion for good government and for competency 
 in high places. In his disposition of patronage he 
 was " a kinless loon," and passed over his brethren 
 after a fashion which still excites our wonder. Nor 
 was it only his own brothers ; those of his colleagues 
 fared no better. 
 
 We find Goulburn, who wanted his brother made 
 a Judge, writing to Peel in 1835 : 
 
 When there are no superior qualifications evidently marking 
 out a man for an office, it is, I think, impolitic to select for 
 appointment those men who have been uniformly opposed 
 to a Government or only recently converted. I may live 
 [mark the sarcasm] in a peculiar society, but I can assure you 
 
 ^ Sir Robert Peel from his Private Papers. Edited for his Trustees 
 by C. S. Parker. Three vols. London: John Murray.
 
 336 SIR ROBERT PEEL 
 
 that I find nothing more prejudicial to our interests than the 
 impression which prevails that such is our course. It deadens 
 the exertions of zealous friends, and it makes the large maiss, 
 namely, those who act on interested motives, oppose us as a 
 matter of profitable speculation. I believe that we have 
 suffered more from making Abercrombie Chief Baron than 
 from any act of our last Administration. So much I have 
 thought it right to say on public grounds (vol. ii. p. 273). 
 
 How familiar are the accents of the jobber! Mr. 
 Goulburn was quite right in hinting that it was 
 Peel, and not his Chancellor of the Exchequer, 
 who kept peculiar society. Nothing is rarer in our 
 public men than a genuine devotion to all branches 
 of the public service. Peel kept his eye on every- 
 thing, even meditating a reform of the Scottish 
 judicature. One disadvantage of the democratic 
 system is that a Prime Minister no longer feels 
 himself responsible for good government. He 
 awaits " a mandate " from a mob who are watch- 
 ing a football match. 
 
 Full, however, to overflowing as was Peel's public 
 life, the three most interesting things in its retro- 
 spect are his handhng of CathoHc Emancipation, 
 his attitude towards Parliamentary Reform, and 
 his dealings with Wheat. It was the way he dealt 
 with these questions that puzzled his friends, 
 piqued his opponents, and brought down upon his 
 head the wrath of Oxford Combination-rooms and 
 the fury of farmers' ordinaries. Peel was long a 
 puzzle. " What will Peel do ? " was for decades 
 as provocative a question as his own famous query, 
 " What is a pound ? " 
 
 It cannot be said that Mr. Parker's volumes 
 throw any entirely new light upon Peel's attitude, 
 but they enable us at our leisure and in the ample 
 detail of Peel's own elaborate diction to follow the
 
 SIR ROBERT PEEL 337 
 
 mental operations and digest the conclusions of a 
 cautious, sagacious, and ambitious man whose lot 
 was cast in perilous times. Nor can we help being 
 repeatedly reminded of incidents in the career of 
 Mr. Gladstone and of similarities, both of style 
 and in the treatment of public questions, existing 
 between the master and the pupil. 
 
 The Catholic Question stared Peel in the face 
 from the very beginning. It was like the Catholic 
 University Question of to-day, left open. Cabinet 
 Ministers were free to be Emancipators if they 
 chose so long as they made no attempt upon the 
 King's virtue. Peel had no passionate convictions 
 about anything save the public credit and the 
 administration of just laws by honest men, but 
 his early associations with the stupid party, and 
 the company he kept whilst Irish Chief Secretary 
 from 1812 to 1818, had taught him to regard Pro- 
 testant ascendancy as a condition of government 
 not lightly to be disturbed. In 1817 his pohtical 
 education was sorely encumbered by his proudly 
 donning the chains which Canning had gloriously 
 renounced, which Gladstone was destined too long 
 to clank — the Parliamentary representation of the 
 University of Oxford, a constituency which has 
 never consented to be represented by a man who 
 has saved his country. The University muzzled 
 Mr. Gladstone, it hindered and delayed Peel, who 
 saw clearly enough that Catholic Relief was only 
 a question of time. Canning openly espoused the 
 cause, even as Mr. Balfour has done the kindred 
 question of the present day. The House of Com- 
 mons was at least equally divided; the House of 
 Lords, despite a majority of forty against Relief,
 
 338 SIR ROBERT PEEL 
 
 has never really fought any measure of reform 
 recommended to it by a Tory Minister; and as 
 for the Crown, Peel's lofty spirit scorned a policy 
 which should be founded (to use his own words) 
 " merely on the will or scruples of the King." 
 The contempt entertained both by Peel and 
 WelHngton for George IV. and William IV. gives 
 quite a literary flavour to many of the letters of the 
 two statesmen. But though Peel saw Emancipa- 
 tion afar off, he had no mind to be mixed up in it. 
 It was Canning's question, and between Canning 
 and Peel there was a very imperfect sympathy. 
 Mr. Disraeli tells us that Canning was jealous of 
 Peel, and that Peel did not like Canning. This 
 need not surprise us. Peel was not famous for his 
 friendships. The old Duke, whose behaviour to 
 Peel was angelical, never could be got to believe 
 that Peel did not actually dislike him. To keep 
 Wellington and Peel on speaking terms was quite 
 an occupation for a number of wealthy gentlemen, 
 and inspired many a dull dinner-party in the 
 thirties and forties. The old Tory party hated 
 Canning, fierce anti-Reformer though he was, with 
 
 the hatred it has ever felt " for d d intellect." 
 
 Arbuthnot writes to Peel just after Canning's death 
 to remind him " that our great Tory and aristo- 
 cratical support was caused by the dislike and 
 dread of Canning." Peel relied upon Tory and 
 aristocratical support, and, consequently, when 
 Lord Liverpool retired, and Canning fiercely 
 claimed the succession and obtained (somehow 
 or another) a great hold upon the King, Peel 
 and Wellington cleared out and left Canning to 
 make terms with Lord Lansdowne and a section
 
 SIR ROBERT PEEL 339 
 
 of the Whigs. Peel did not leave on the Catholic 
 Question, for that was not to be agitated; he left 
 because he would not work with Canning. The old 
 King of Terrors dominates Parliaments. Canning's 
 sudden removal from the playhouse of St. Stephen's 
 made it much easier for Peel to add a new part to 
 his repertoire^ namel}', the character of an eman- 
 cipator. Canning died in ofhce in August, 1827. 
 In January, 1829, a complete measure of Catholic 
 Relief was decided upon by the Duke's Govern- 
 ment, and the man to introduce it to the House 
 of Commons was the statesman who, whenever 
 Canning had advocated Emancipation, had risen 
 from the same bench to protest against it in 
 language which drew down upon him the benedic- 
 tions of the Protestants of Ireland. Oxford re- 
 volted. Peel resigned his seat, and after a contest 
 the University found a much fitter representative 
 in another Sir Robert whose surname was Inglis. 
 The Bill became law in March, 1829. Does any- 
 body ask what became of the majority of forty 
 against Emancipation in our second Chamber? 
 The answer must be that in 1829 the House of 
 Lords was Wellington's pocket-borough, just as 
 in 1899 it is Lord Salisbury's. Had the Whigs 
 introduced Catholic Emancipation in 1829 the 
 Lords would have treated it as they did Mr. 
 Gladstone's Home Rule Bill in 1894; but as the 
 measure was countersigned by Wellington they 
 treated it as they did Lord Salisbury's Vaccination 
 Bill in 1898. Were I a Tory averse to Socialistic 
 measures I would rather rely upon the sober, 
 deep-rooted conservatism of the English people 
 than upon the House of Lords.
 
 340 SIR ROBERT PEEL 
 
 Peel's vindication is, of course, that fascinating 
 river — the Father Tiber to whom all politicians 
 pray — the course or current of events. The Clare 
 election, the revolt of the tenants, the transfer 
 by the will of Parliament of political power from 
 one party to another! Let us listen for a moment 
 to the grave voice of Peel: 
 
 This afforded a decisive proof not only that the instrument 
 on which the Protestant proprietor had hitherto mainly relied 
 for the maintenance of his political influence [the forty- 
 shilling franchise for tenants] had completely failed him, but 
 that through the combined exertions of the agitator and the 
 priest — or, I should rather say, through the contagious sym- 
 pathies of a common cause among all classes of the Roman 
 Catholic population — the instrument of defence and supremacy 
 had been converted into a weapon fatal to the authority of 
 the landlord. 
 
 However men might differ as to the consequences which 
 ought to follow the event, no one denied its vast importance. 
 It was foreseen by the most intelligent men that the Clare 
 election would be the turning-point in the Catholic Question, 
 the point partes ubi se via findit in ambas. 
 
 " Concede nothing to agitation " is the ready cry of those 
 who are not responsible, the vigour of whose decisions is often 
 proportionate to their own personal immunity from danger 
 and to their imperfect knowledge of the true state of affairs. 
 
 A prudent Minister before he determines against all con- 
 cession, against any yielding or compromise of former opinions, 
 must well consider what it is that he has to resist and what 
 are his powers of resistance. His task would be an easy one 
 if it were sufficient to resolve that he would yield nothing to 
 violence or to the menace of physical force. 
 
 \Vhat was the evil to be apprehended ? Not force, not 
 violence, not any act of which the law could take cognis- 
 ance. The real danger was in the peaceable and legitimate 
 exercise of a franchise according to the will and conscience 
 of the holder. 
 
 In such an exercise of that franchise, not merely permitted, 
 but encouraged and approved by constitutional law, was 
 involved a revolution in the electoral system of Ireland, the 
 transfer of political power, so far as it was connected with 
 representation, from one party to another (vol. ii., p. 48). 
 
 If the Irish Government could neither turn for aid to the 
 then existing Parliament, nor could cherish the hope of
 
 SIR ROBERT PEEL 341 
 
 receiving it from one to be newly elected, could it safely trust 
 for the maintenance of its authority to the extreme exercise 
 of its ordinary powers, supported, in the case of necessity, 
 by the organised and disciplined force at its command, namely, 
 the constabulary and military force? (vol. ii. p. 49). 
 
 I deliberately affirm that a Minister of the Crown responsible 
 at the time of which I am speaking for the public peace and 
 the public welfare ^^•ould have grossly and scandalously 
 neglected his duty if he had failed to 'consider whether it 
 might not be possible that the fever of religious and political 
 excitement — which was quickening the pulse and fluttering 
 the bosom of the whole Catholic population, which had 
 inspired the serf of Clare with the resolution and energy of a 
 freeman, which had in the twinkling of an eye made all con- 
 sideration of personal gratitude, ancient family connection, 
 local preferences, the fear of worldly injury, the hope of 
 worldly advantage subordinate to one absorbing sense of 
 religious obligation and public duty — -whether, I say, it might 
 not be possible that the contagion of that feverish excitement 
 might spread beyond the barriers which, under ordinary 
 circumstances, the habits of military obedience and the 
 strictness of mihtary discipline oppose to all such external 
 influences (vol. ii. p. 50). 
 
 This surely is convincing. But should Peel have 
 been the man to tackle the job ? He did not want 
 to do so. He begged hard to be allowed to stand 
 aside. The Duke was a plain soldier, ready enough, 
 as Huskisson once found, to take even a politician 
 at his first word; but the Duke would not take 
 Peel at his first or second word, but made it plain 
 to him (as perhaps it was plain before) that without 
 him the Relief Bill must be abandoned. " I entreat 
 you, then, to reconsider the subject, and to give 
 us and the country the benefit of your advice and 
 assistance in this most difficult and important 
 crisis." So wrote the Duke (vol. ii. p. 81). 
 
 Peel consented. It required enormous courage. 
 
 We were about to forfeit the confidence and encounter 
 the hostility of a very great portion of our own party. The 
 principle of concession had been affirmed by the House of
 
 342 SIR ROBERT PEEL 
 
 Commons in the last discussion by the very smallest majority 
 — 272 to 266. It had been negatived in the House of Lords 
 by a majority of 40. The King was hostile, the Church was 
 hostile, a majority probably of the people of Great Britain 
 was hostile, to concession (vol. ii. p. 85). 
 
 Oh for an hour, in these cowardly days, of 
 a statesman with a tithe of the courage of Sir 
 Robert Peel! 
 
 " In a single session Peel and Wellington over- 
 came the resistance of a hostile Sovereign, a hostile 
 Church, a hostile House of Lords, and a public 
 opinion fast becoming hostile." So writes Mr. 
 Thursfield, who also reminds us of the fine compli- 
 ment paid by Peel in his speech on the second 
 reading to the injured " shade " of Canning. 
 " Would he were here," cried Peel, " to enjoy 
 the fruits of his victory! 
 
 " Tuque tuis armis, nos te poteremur Achille." 
 
 Admirably does Mr. Thursfield proceed: 
 
 The tribute was well merited and not ungenerously ex- 
 pressed; but perhaps, if the shade of Canning could have 
 revisited the House of Commons and could have watched 
 Peel, shorn of the prize for which both had contended, writhing 
 in agony at the whips and scorns of time, the irony of cir- 
 cumstance, the revenge of neglected opportunities, and the 
 reproaches of friends who felt themselves abandoned and 
 betrayed, the words to rise almost unbidden to his phantom 
 lips would have been: 
 
 " Pallas te, hoc vulnere, Pallas 
 Immolat, et paenas scelerato ex sanguine sumit." 
 
 There is no end to capping verses. The compli- 
 ments rival politicians occasionally pay one another 
 are apt to be a little overdone. Great questions 
 belong to the nation and not to individuals, how- 
 ever eloquent or long-winded. Besides, it is always 
 easier to be generous to the dead than just to the
 
 SIR ROBERT PEEL 343 
 
 living. Peel's conduct in this matter gave an 
 envious stab at his reputation. He was " suspect " 
 from that hour. One of his friends took on so about 
 it that he had to be blooded (vol. ii. p. 94). He 
 (the phlebotomised friend) got over it, for we find 
 him in 1834 breathing a fervent prayer that Peel 
 might be " destined by the Almighty to save 
 the country at the moment of peril " (vol. ii. 
 p. 262). Peel was the most prayed-over politician 
 of recent times. 
 
 In the matter of Parliamentary Reform Peel 
 was from the first a Moderate. He was the last 
 man in the world to share Burke's romantic 
 attachment to rotten boroughs, or the Duke of 
 Wellington's babyish aversion to big towns; nor 
 was he gifted or cursed with the foresight of 
 Canning, who perceived that a reformed House 
 of Commons must eventually prove fatal to the 
 pretensions of the landed interest in the House 
 of Lords. Speaking at Liverpool in 1820, Canning 
 had asked: 
 
 When once the House of Commons should become a mere 
 deputation speaking the people's wall, by what assumption 
 of right could three or four hundred great proprietors set 
 themselves against the national will ? 
 
 Peel was in favour of going slowly in the matter, 
 and when opportunity offered (as it frequently did), 
 of giving large towns parliamentary representa- 
 tion; but the Duke was obdurate, and the omni- 
 scient Croker was certain that the country was 
 indifferent. We all know what happened. The 
 flames of Nottingham Castle and the Bristol mobs 
 intimidated the House of Lords, who in 1832 
 yielded to fear as in 1829 they yielded to the Duke.
 
 344 SIR ROBERT PEEL 
 
 Peel's opposition to reform can best be explained 
 in his own words : 
 
 WTiy have we been struggling against the Reform Bill in 
 the House of Commons ? Not in the hope of resisting its final 
 success in that House, but because we look beyond the Bill, 
 because we know the nature of popular concessions, their 
 tendency to propagate the necessity for further and more 
 extensive compliances. We want to make the descensus as 
 difficilis as we can — to teach young inexperienced men charged 
 with the trust of government that, though they may be 
 backed by popular clamour, they shall not override, on the 
 first springtide of excitement, every barrier and breakwater 
 raised against popular impulses ; that the carrying of extensive 
 changes in the Constitution without previous deliberatior 
 shall not be a holiday task; that there shall be just what has 
 happened — the House sick of the question, the Ministers 
 repenting they brought it forward, the country paying the 
 penalty for the folly and incapacity of its rulers. All these 
 are salutary sufferings, that may, I trust, make people here- 
 after distinguish between the amendment and the overturning 
 of their institutions (vol. ii. p. 201). 
 
 When the second Reform Bill had been defeated 
 in the Lords on Lyndhurst's amendment, and 
 Lord Grey resigned, the Duke of Welhngton, whose 
 political stomach could digest anything, was ready 
 and wilhng, and even anxious, to form an Adminis- 
 tration, and become responsible for " an extensive 
 measure " of parliamentary reform. He could not 
 do this without Peel, and Peel would not on this 
 occasion come to his assistance. The Duke never 
 quite forgave Peel for this. Even Croker was on 
 the Duke's side, but Peel was adamant. When 
 reminded of his behaviour in 1829, he replied 
 emphatically : 
 
 It is not a repetition of the Catholic Question. I was 
 then in office. I had advised the concession as a Minister. I 
 should now assume office for the purpose of carrying the 
 measure to which up to the last moment I have been 
 inveterately opposed (vol. ii. p. 206).
 
 SIR ROBERT PEEL 345 
 
 There can be no doubt he was right. It was all 
 very well for the hero of Waterloo to play what 
 pranks he chose in the political arena, but Peel 
 was not a soldier but a statesman. Besides, after 
 the events that had happened a compromise was 
 impossible. 
 
 Peel's connection with the duties on corn is a 
 thrice-told tale. If he is the victor who remains 
 in possession of the field, nothing can now be said 
 to impair the fame of the great statesman who, 
 though surrounded as he was in the House he so 
 dearly loved by men impervious to reason and 
 indifferent to human suffering, resolutely thrust 
 them behind him, and pursued amidst " detrac- 
 tions rude " the path of Free Trade and gave the 
 people bread. His conversion may have been slow, 
 but it was sure. His face was always turned to 
 the cheap markets. Cobden, a not too generous 
 foe, as early as 1842 pronounced Peel a free-trader. 
 His budgets made it plain, his speeches were full 
 of Free Trade. Corn, doubtless, always stood by 
 itself. The staple produce of the land could hardly 
 do otherwise in the mind of the leader of a party 
 which, as Lord Ashburton put it in 1841, "was 
 pledged to the support of the land; that principle 
 abandoned, the party is dissolved " (vol. ii. p. 507). 
 It may well be that it was bad harvests and 
 wet seasons that eventually forced Peel's hands, 
 but it was not Peel's hands for which we may 
 thank God — but his open mind. Let us hsten 
 again to the voice of Peel: 
 
 The Tariff does not go half far enough. If we could afford 
 it, we ought to take off the duty on cotton-wools and the duty 
 on foreign sheep's wool (vol. ii. p. 529).
 
 346 SIR ROBERT PEEL 
 
 We must make this country a cheap country for Uving and 
 thus induce parties to remain here, enable them to consume 
 more by having more to spend (vol. ii. p. 530). 
 
 The danger is not low prices from the Tariff, but low prices 
 from inability to consume. 
 
 If Sir Charles Burrell had such cases before him as I have of 
 thousands and tens of thousands in want of food and employ- 
 ment at Greenock, Paisley, Edinburgh, and a dozen large 
 towns in the manufacturing districts, he would not expect 
 me to rend my garments in despair if " some excellent jerked 
 beef from South America " should get into the English market 
 and bring down meat from y^d. or 8d. a pound (vol. ii. p. 531). 
 
 To the Marquis of Ailsa Peel wrote in March, 
 1842: 
 
 Whatever the future may be, no one can think the present 
 state of things very satisfactory. If I were a landed proprietor 
 in the West of Scotland, and saw 17,000 persons supported 
 during the winter, as in one Scotch town, Paisley, by charitable 
 contributions, I should seriously inquire whether the con- 
 tinuance of such a state of things was quite compatible 
 with the security or, at least, the enjoyment of property 
 (vol. ii. p. 527). 
 
 Such sarcasm was quite thrown away upon the 
 Marquis of Ailsa; it might as well have been 
 addressed to the Craig of that ilk. 
 
 To get a complete understanding of the progress 
 of this question, Mr. Parker's volumes must be 
 supplemented by Mr. Morley's Life of Cobden, and 
 by the speeches of Mr. Villiers and Mr. Bright. 
 But the more the times are studied the more will 
 Peel, as a practical statesman and a man of judg- 
 ment and devotion, stand head and shoulders above 
 his contemporaries. 
 
 An able writer in a recent number of the Quar- 
 terly Review is indisposed to call Peel a great man 
 because he lacked imagination and preferred to 
 co-operate with Wellington and Sir James Graham 
 than to bluster with Palmerston or hob-a-nob with
 
 SIR ROBERT PEEL 347 
 
 Disraeli. It all depends upon your standard. What 
 is a pound ? In the currency of Parliament and in 
 the estimation of the country Peel was a great man. 
 In one respect only do I find myself like Mr. 
 Goulburn " in a peculiar society." I (no doubt 
 I am wrong) deeply regret the publication of the 
 Disraeli letters. Magnanimity is so beautiful a 
 thing that its essential privacy should be preserved 
 as a noble family tradition even at the expense of 
 the public. Had Peel chosen in 1846 to produce 
 the letter of 1841, of the existence of which he gave 
 Disraeli a pretty broad hint, nobody could have 
 complained and Disraeli could have replied. Peel 
 did not do so, and what he, magnanimously, in the 
 heat of conflict, and in the face of insult, forbore 
 from doing, Mr. Parker does in 1899. It is of the 
 essence of magnanimity that it should be complete 
 and eternal. Unless it is that it is no magnanimity 
 at all. To suppress a document for fifty years and 
 until the man who wrote it is dead is no kindness. 
 No good has been done by publication. For a 
 couple of days the Tadpoles and the Tapers, that 
 breed of curs, ran about sniffing and snuffing over 
 the letters; the young lions of the press roared 
 over them, rejoicing that their client, the public, 
 should be let behind the scenes. But the many- 
 headed Beast is not nearly so big a fool as those 
 who cater for his capacious maw would often have 
 us believe. The many-headed knows its Disraeli 
 perfectly well, and how he never pretended to be 
 a man of nicety. He ate his peck of dirt and 
 achieved his measure of dignity. In the vulgar 
 struggle for existence Disraeli did some mean and 
 shabby things; the letter of 1841 was perhaps one
 
 348 SIR ROBERT PEEL 
 
 of them, the denial of it in 1846 was perhaps 
 another, but a mean and shabby man DisraeH 
 was not, and his reputation, such as it is, stands 
 just where it did before these disclosures. The 
 two letters are out of place in these stately 
 memorials of a saviour of society. They jar upon 
 you like a vulgar word scribbled on the pedestal 
 of a noble statue. When the Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer the other day made his annual reference 
 to the rise in the value of our shares in the Suez 
 Canal, never were the cheers louder. Disraeli, too, 
 had his day; and though, for my part, I would 
 as soon think of coupling Dr. Johnson with Jacques 
 Casanova as Peel with Disraeli, I can still, remem- 
 bering all the differences in the circumstances of 
 the two men, find room for a regret that these 
 memoirs should be made the vehicle of seeking 
 to cast an unnecessary slur upon the memory of 
 a man who, when all is said and done, will remain 
 the author of the finest literary tribute to the 
 character of Peel ever likely to be written.
 
 THE PRIVATE LETTERS OF 
 SIR ROBERT PEEL ^ 
 
 {7 he Nation^ 1921) 
 
 THIS is a very interesting book, for from 
 almost every page strong sidelights are 
 cast upon the mentality of a man who 
 was not only amongst the greatest (the list is not 
 very long) of English statesmen, but was declared 
 to be by one who had watched him in the House 
 of Commons at only too close quarters "the 
 greatest member of Parliament that ever lived." 
 Sir Robert Peel, though a keen "shot" and an 
 indefatigable slaughterer of small game, was a slow- 
 moving man, both in mind and body. His tempera- 
 ment was not only pre-eminently conservative and 
 cautious, but was not without a touch of that 
 slavishness so noticeable in his most distinguished 
 pupil, Gladstone. And yet what a life he led the 
 Tory Party! A cat among the pigeons! And how 
 exciting and mobile was his own political career, 
 and how gravely, yet how courageously, he faced 
 the questions of the day, and talked with his bitter 
 enemies in the gate. 
 
 In these harum-scarum days when no one can 
 guess beforehand what a Prime Minister will say, 
 or how he will say it, it is something of a relief to 
 while away a few hours over three admirably edited 
 
 ' The Private Letters oj Sir Robert Peel. Edited by George Peel 
 (Murray) . 
 
 349
 
 350 PEEL'S PRIVATE LETTERS 
 
 volumes of Mr. C. S. Parker, entitled Sir Robert 
 Peel. From his Private Papers (i 891-1899). No 
 finer memorial, dignified but moving, exists of a 
 public man; and there as on a pedestal, "more 
 lasting than brass," will ever stand the tall and 
 stately figure of the Sir Robert who kept revolution 
 at bay, and who is as firmly imbedded in our 
 national history as the very different figure of that 
 other Sir Robert, who a century earlier prevented 
 the Stuarts from returning to Whitehall. 
 
 Peel may be accounted lucky in his memorial 
 volumes. Disraeli, in his bizarre, but ever fas- 
 cinating Life of Lord George Bentinck, has devoted 
 a chapter to the character and personality of the 
 man he tortured and defamed — a chapter that 
 tempts us to make the same smuggish remark 
 which Milton has put into the mouth of Adam 
 when the Almighty shows him for the first time 
 the beautiful Mother of Mankind: 
 
 This turn doth make amends. 
 
 Disraeli has certainly succeeded in doing what Sir 
 Robert himself usually failed to do — in making 
 Peel interesting. Furthermore, another writer, to 
 us as agreeable and more edifying than Disraeli, 
 Dr. Newman, has in one of his discursive contri- 
 butions to controversial literature thrown light 
 upon some aspects of Peel's mentality. 
 
 Towards the end of 1840, Sir Robert, setting the 
 example to Sir Barnes Newcome, who lectured his 
 constituents on "Mrs. Hemans and the Poetry of 
 the Affections," gave an address at Tamworth, on 
 the opening of a reading-room to be run on non- 
 sectarian lines, to which discourse we see, from the
 
 PEEL'S PRIVATE LETTERS 351 
 
 volume now under review, Lady Peel writing to 
 her "dear, dearest Frederick" refers: "You shall 
 certainly have your Papa's pamphlet of his beauti- 
 ful speech at Tamworth as soon as it comes out. 
 The one you have seen advertised is not the true 
 one" (p. 175). This "beautiful speech," as reported 
 in the newspapers, attracted Newman's attention, 
 and being, as considering the occasion it could 
 hardly help being, full of " Broughamism," with a 
 touch of "Benthamism," and a glorification of the 
 "Pursuit of Learning under Difficulties," and the 
 "Diffusion of Useful Knowledge," drew from this 
 ever eager controversialist on such subjects four 
 letters to the Times, which may now be read with 
 delight in Newman's Discussions and Arguments 
 under the title "The Tamworth Reading-Room." 
 More eloquent letters have never been addressed 
 to an editor. When it is a question of ridiculing 
 the pretensions of man to be a reasoning animal, 
 Montaigne, Pascal, and Newman attain the same 
 rare altitudes; and the way they exercise their 
 reasoning powers in abusing reason (of whom, one 
 cannot help seeing, they are all the time desperately 
 afraid) never fails to excite our admiration. In the 
 course of these letters Newman has occasion to 
 make many interesting and searching remarks 
 about Sir Robert Peel, for whose statesmanship, 
 character, and piety he had (being, like Peel, an 
 Oxford man) great regard, though the one Oxonian 
 could never forgive the other for saying that the 
 "pleasures of physical science" could impart 
 "consolation" to a dying man. 
 
 Peel's grandson has in this volume (and we are 
 grateful to him for it) lit another candle for us, a
 
 352 PEEL'S PRIVATE LETTERS 
 
 domestic light that enables us, if so minded, to 
 gain further insight into the character of the great 
 Repealer. Domestic letters do not lend them- 
 selves to criticism. Sir Robert loved his wife so 
 well as to be occasionally piqued at the slowness 
 of her response, and she loved him so well as not 
 infrequently to be jealous. They had a fine large 
 family of handsome children, in whose society they 
 both took pleasure from the cradle. The slings and 
 arrows of outrageous political fortune never pene- 
 trated their comfortable homesteads. They had 
 fine tastes, plenty of money, good looks, position, 
 and patronage ; and if they were not really religious 
 in the Newmanic sense, they thought they were, 
 and said their unfaltering prayers accordingly. It 
 is on the small things of life that domestic letters 
 turn the light, and from this volume it is made 
 abundantly plain that Sir Robert Peel was a man 
 not easy to please, and that though stiff in his own 
 manners and by no means the best of company, he 
 was easily bored in that of other people. 
 
 His letters to his wife when visiting alone would 
 make up a Gallery of Frights, though, as his 
 grandson shrewdly observes, this "stringency of 
 tone may be accounted for by a natural desire 
 to minimise the social enjoyments in which his 
 wife did not share" (p. 73). 
 
 We had the Archbishop and Mrs. Sutton. You never saw- 
 so vulgar a woman as Mrs. Sutton (p. 51). 
 
 I wish you could see Mrs. Huskisson's dress and affected 
 manner, making ugliness fifty times more ugly (p. 61). 
 
 I do not recollect when I have been more surprised than on 
 the appearance of Mrs. Baring in the drawing-room before 
 dinner. . . . Someone told us that though not a perfect 
 beauty, she had fine eyes. I could scarcely beheve my own 
 when I saw a short and ugly, stumpy woman (p. 74).
 
 PEEL'S PRIVATE LETTERS 353 
 
 Lady G. Fane I have long thought the most impertinent 
 and odious woman in England (p. 87). 
 
 Three frightful sisters of Lord Portarhngton (p. 118). 
 
 And SO on. 
 
 Nor were dinner parties always endurable. 
 
 We had a most vulgar dinner yesterday at Sir James Flower's 
 house — a bad repetition of the Fish Dinner. Eternal puffing of 
 bad wine. But the host is the most remarkable attender in the 
 House of Commons of all the Members. He has dined every 
 day at two o'clock, arrived at the House at four, has never 
 left it, and out of 221 divisions has been in 211, more than any 
 member of the Government. 
 
 By his dinners he has gained considerable influence, has 
 never asked a favour, and has never voted against the Govern- 
 ment. He deserves from me, therefore, that I should undergo 
 the penance of sitting next to him at dinner and hearing his 
 remonstrances against mixing water with wine (p. 245). 
 
 The number of dull dinner parties that were 
 given in those days in order to keep Wellington 
 and Peel on speaking terms was abnormal — and 
 we cannot but feel sorry for Sir James Flower, 
 who probably found Peel every bit as dull as the 
 great man did him. But we suppose he got some 
 satisfaction out of it which Peel did not. 
 
 But we must end on a higher note. The real 
 Peel — the great Peel — is revealed to us in a con- 
 versation too long to be here quoted, but which 
 is set out at length on page 285 of Mr. George 
 Peel's book. The scene is Peel's house in Whitehall 
 Gardens, the date is 1847, and the recorder of the 
 conversation is the Comte de Jarnac, the represen- 
 tative of Louis Philippe at the Court of St. James's. 
 
 I found myself after dinner sitting next my host. . . . He 
 spoke to me first of the Socialist writings of Louis Blanc, 
 which he had studied very closely, and asked me as to the 
 extent of their influence in France. I expressed the hope 
 that such appeals to revolt against the inevitable conditions 
 I z
 
 354 PEEL'S PRIVATE LETTERS 
 
 of ci\dlised society would never find many dupes or victims 
 among a population so intelligent as our own. 
 
 Sir Robert listened to me with close attention, in that 
 thoughtful attitude which was his wont, his head a little bowed, 
 his cheek resting on his hand, slightly inclining his head when 
 my words accorded with his own feelings, and shaking it sadly 
 when he could not share in my optimism. 
 
 At length he looked up and began to speak. Such writings, 
 he argued, must not be judged by the effect they may produce 
 upon the fortunate ones of this world whom education or 
 enlightenment can preserve in comfort. But our civilisation 
 has had the result of dooming numberless millions of human 
 beings to an existence of perpetual labour, to profound ignor- 
 ance and to sufferings as difficult to remedy as they are 
 undeserved. What ferments will not be produced in these 
 cramped intelligences, in their embittered hearts, by such 
 passionate invitations to their hopes, to their desires, and to 
 their revenge ? 
 
 ^fe^ 
 
 And so on the conversation rolled! Sir Robert 
 may not have been an original thinker, but he 
 supplies food for thought as much now as in 1847.
 
 JOHN BRIGHT 1 
 
 1911 
 
 I AM by this time a very hardened speaker, 
 and have long since lost all compassion for 
 my audience. Why should I have any com- 
 passion ? I have myself suffered many things at 
 the mouths of many orators, and if I have suffered 
 why should not you ? But I admit that on this 
 especial occasion I am beset with something which 
 reminds me of what I used to feel and which I 
 suppose I may perhaps call modesty. I am beset 
 with shyness. It really does seem to me something 
 which savours of impertinence that I should invite 
 the people of Rochdale to come and hear me talk 
 about John Bright. It is almost an outrage. 
 
 What can I say really worthy of so great an 
 occasion ? I feel that all I can do is to take pains 
 to do my best. Ah, yes. It is all very well to say, 
 " hear, hear," but that involves some serious 
 consequences for you — for whenever I feel it my 
 duty to take pains to do my best I feel myself 
 constrained and forced to abandon the easy 
 facilities, the spontaneities, the parentheses and 
 vagrant fancies of the spoken word. 
 
 Whenever I feel it my duty to do my best 
 I take to my pen and produce a manuscript. 
 Silence! However, I assure you, as in all human 
 things, there is compensation about this, for my 
 
 ' An address delivered at Rochdale on i6th November, 191 1. 
 (London, T. Fisher Unwin.) 
 
 355
 
 356 JOHN BRIGHT 
 
 manuscript will take a shorter time to read than 
 my speech, had I left myself free, would have taken 
 me to deliver. There is compensation in that. 
 Therefore, without any more ado and regardless 
 of your feelings — I produce out of my pocket my 
 manuscript and proceed to read it. But I hope to 
 be able to do so after a fashion which will at all 
 events enable my voice to reach to the end of this 
 very beautiful and excellent hall, about the acoustic 
 properties of which I know nothing, for I am 
 sorry to say, and am ashamed to say, that this is 
 the first time I have ever been in Rochdale. 
 
 This is primarily a meeting of Lancashire men 
 and women, of Lancashire Members of Parliament, 
 and other representative bodies, to do honour in 
 the place of his birth and habitation to a famous 
 Lancashire man on the one-hundredth anniversary 
 of his first infant cry. My right to be here, my only 
 right, is that I, too, by birth and breeding belong 
 to the County Palatine. Now, if the promoters of 
 this meeting had been wiser men than they are — 
 they are wise, but they might have been wiser 
 — they would have selected in my place to-night 
 an older man, someone who knew John Bright 
 well. This is the centenary of Bright's birth, and 
 there are still, happily, living amongst us in this 
 town and in this hall, many, I doubt not, who 
 knew him well; who sat at meat with him; who 
 walked and talked and lived with him; who knew 
 John Bright as he lived and moved and had his 
 being. But when it comes to be the centenary of 
 his death, March, 1989, if that occurrence is 
 celebrated, there will be no one in the wide world 
 who ever set eyes upon him; and his personality,
 
 JOHN BRIGHT 357 
 
 if transmitted at all, can then only be so by means 
 of portraits, statues, busts, letters, speeches, 
 biographies, and the recorded evidence of friends 
 and enemies — and be it observed that for the 
 purpose of transmitting a personality, a spiteful 
 enemy may do it better than a vapid friend. 
 Lucky fellow was Dr. Johnson, who had his portrait 
 painted by Sir Joshua, and his life written by 
 Boswell! We cannot all — no one, perhaps — expect 
 such good fortune as that. But nevertheless it is 
 of extreme importance, while there is yet time, to 
 preserve and place on record all the personalia of 
 an illustrious dead man, and therefore I regret 
 that you have not here before you to-night some- 
 one who knew John Bright well. 
 
 My acquaintance with him was of the shghtest. 
 I heard him speak twice, and twice only, in Liver- 
 pool, but I never heard him speak in the House 
 of Commons, and speak triumphantly as he often 
 did in the House of Commons. And when I say 
 triumphantly I am not referring to triumph in 
 the lobby, but to something greater and nobler 
 than that. I say to hear a man speak triumphantly 
 in the House of Commons is a supreme test of 
 British oratory. That good fortune I never had. 
 On one occasion only I met him face to face. It 
 was on a Yorkshire moor near Ilkley Wells. He 
 had, I should surmise, been shut up in the house 
 for a few days and was rejoicing in his convales- 
 cence. As he walked he threw open his arms and 
 quoted with force and feeling the well-known hues : 
 
 See the wretch who long has tost 
 
 On the thorny bed of pain, 
 At length repair his vigour lost. 
 
 And walk and breathe again.
 
 358 JOHN BRIGHT 
 
 The meanest floweret of the vale, 
 The simplest note that swells the gale, 
 The common sun, the air, the skies. 
 To him are opening paradise. 
 
 After quoting these lines, Bright by some shp of 
 the memory attributed them to Goldsmith. I had 
 the courage to murmur " Gray," and was rewarded 
 by a glance that convinced me that this great 
 orator, like others I have known since, did not 
 always love to be corrected. 
 
 Half a century ago the three foremost orators 
 in England were all Lancashire men. Lord Derby, 
 so conveniently dubbed the " Rupert of debate " 
 by the first Lord Lytton in a poem that ought 
 not to be half-forgotten, Mr. Gladstone, and 
 Mr. Bright; I have listened to all three, and 
 the only one of them whose speech did not in- 
 stantly betray his Lancashire origin was Bright. 
 His accents were faultless. If to speak your native 
 tongue nobly and well and to write it legibly are 
 the best proofs of education, John Bright was not 
 only what I should think the general verdict has 
 found him to be- — the greatest orator of his time 
 — but also the best educated man. I am not, 
 however, prepared to admit that education cannot 
 do you a better turn than help you to become an 
 orator and a calligraphist. And here to-night we 
 are concerned not merely with the orator or with 
 the calligraphist, but with John Bright as a whole. 
 
 The first question to ask about anybody is : 
 Has he any character ? " Most women," wrote an 
 unmarried poet, " have no character at all." Pope 
 was wrong, not right, in writing " most," but had 
 he said — and there was nothing he could not tag 
 into his rhymes — had he said that many people,
 
 JOHN BRIGHT 359 
 
 men and women alike, have no character worth 
 investigating, so insipid are they, he would have 
 avoided satire and told the whole truth, which 
 satire never does. But whatever may be the 
 numbers of these people without characters, be 
 they large or be they small, they are not worth 
 keeping, even on the top shelves of your library. 
 Now, John Bright had a character which I am sure 
 he exhibited in the nursery within a few hours of 
 his birth, in the House of Commons, in the Reform 
 Club, wherever he was. He put it in his speeches. 
 It lurks in his letters. It exploded in his talk. It 
 formed his marvellous style. You saw it clearly 
 in his face and figure, in his manner of holding 
 himself; in all that he said or did. 
 
 He was not a man to-day and a woman to- 
 morrow. There was a great deal more than a note 
 of immutability in his character. He was all 
 through his life very much the same man. He 
 might easily have been born in surroundings and 
 exposed to circumstances which would have come 
 into early collision with these innate characteristics. 
 And then, why then, there would have been a 
 great deal of trouble for somebody. Think of 
 J. A. Froude, born in the house of an archdeacon, 
 who would not even allow a copy of The Pilgrim's 
 Progress to come into it. That is the sort of domestic 
 discipline to which many men are exposed, some- 
 times for good and sometimes for evil; but it was 
 a sort of discipline Bright was destined to escape. 
 He was born and bred amongst the Society of 
 Friends, who from the first seem to leave their 
 young people very much alone without creeds or 
 catechisms, to think for themselves, and are indeed
 
 36o JOHN BRIGHT 
 
 somewhat proud of their mental exclusiveness and 
 perpetual minority. 
 
 Quakers, as they are commonly called, have no 
 particular passion for any other catholicity than 
 that of the spirit. Emerson somewhere said, " If 
 a man would be great he must be a Nonconformist " 
 — meaning thereby not a sectarian of any particular 
 kind, but a spirit which stands bold and erect 
 among the mob of worshippers, and asks itself 
 which of all the shrines is best entitled to the 
 homage of his knee. Most of us are born in chains 
 and die ere we are half emancipated. But I can 
 find no trace in the early days of Bright of strife 
 with authority or even of the domination of great 
 names. All through his life — so at least it appears 
 to me — Bright was a solitary thinker. He was not 
 gregarious in his habits of thought. He liked to 
 do what he liked and in his own way. He had no 
 especial fondness for gathering himself together 
 with others. And I suspect, although I may be 
 wrong, he rarely attended any public meeting 
 which he did not address. The attitude of his mind 
 was that of a solitary; reverential towards God 
 (a very untheological deity), but by no means so 
 towards any of God's creatures. He was very 
 critical and indisposed, easily, at all events, to 
 recognise established reputations. 
 
 Mobs of all sorts he hated as only a Radical 
 can, but his particular detestation was a well- 
 dressed mob composed of those who had taken 
 university degrees and thought you could make 
 the foreigner pay by the imposition of a tariff. 
 
 It has been hinted to me, but I can hardly 
 believe it, that some excellent people in this
 
 JOHN BRIGHT 361 
 
 neighbourhood have fought a httlc shy of this 
 celebration, fearing lest it might assume the 
 complexion of a party meeting, held to do honour 
 to a party man. 
 
 John Bright was never a party man, unless — 
 and here I may make an exception — unless it were 
 during that very short and comparatively inglorious 
 period of his life when he was a Cabinet Minister. 
 
 No Party Whip ever drove Bright into a lobby. 
 What is the chief note of a merely party man ? 
 It is surely mobility. The party man is impression- 
 able, fluid, transitional. His is an expansive creed, 
 framed with one eye, at all events, upon the 
 electorate. Bright was none of these things. He 
 was always a Free Trader out and out. He was 
 always a franchise man on bold and simple lines. 
 He was always against Church Establishments, 
 whether in Ireland, Wales, Scotland, England, 
 or anywhere else. He always preached Peace, 
 Retrenchment, and Reform, and if and so far as 
 the Liberal Party agreed with him on these sub- 
 jects he agreed with them — but not otherwise. 
 
 He hated Palmerston, disliked Russell, and 
 although he loved yet he differed from Gladstone. 
 Nor did he share many, if any, of the nascent 
 enthusiasms of the young Liberal or Tory demo- 
 crat. He stood alone, thinking for himself, a great 
 and scornful Parliamentary figure, and orator, 
 but no party man. 
 
 Bright, I repeat, had character. It is easier to 
 discern character than to analyse it. To analyse 
 character is a rude and dangerous pastime, but it 
 has always had for me a great fascination. John 
 Bright, as I read his character, was a positive
 
 362 JOHN BRIGHT 
 
 man with perhaps an unspeculative mind, and 
 without what I can only call historical curiosity. 
 I don't think he ever took very great pains to 
 discover precisely how things happened in the 
 past. When he once got a good grip of a subject, 
 and his grip was usually good, he was content. 
 
 This lack of curiosity is the besetting sin of great 
 orators and politicians. I remember years ago 
 trying, in vain, to induce a very eminent politician 
 indeed, who was then much disposed to boast his 
 descent from one of the two thousand ministers 
 who were ejected from their livings in the Church 
 of England in the time of Charles H., to try and 
 find out how this dispossessed ancestor first got 
 possession of the living from which he was ejected. 
 In other words, to find out, if possible, whom he 
 turned out during the time of the Great Rebellion. 
 I offered to lend him my copy of Walker's Suffer- 
 ings of the Clergy (in folio) to aid him in this, as it 
 seemed to me, admirable enterprise, but he hardly 
 hearkened unto me. He was not interested in 
 this part of our Church history; only in an isolated 
 fact that lent itself to oratorical utterance before 
 a friendly and therefore uncritical audience. This 
 is a temptation to which all orators, and even 
 politicians who are not orators, are subject, and 
 if it fits in, as it sometimes does, with a tempera- 
 mental lack of historical curiosity it may lead, 
 it almost must lead, to very short and therefore 
 false views, and certainly to an unsympathetic 
 treatment of men in the past whose chief difference 
 from ourselves was that they lived in different times. 
 But before going on to deal with the great 
 political causes with which John Bright's public
 
 JOHN BRIGHT 363 
 
 life was so gloriously connected, I would like to 
 say a word or two more about the general aspect 
 of his most interesting character, as illustrated 
 by his outlook upon the world as he saw it in 
 his day and generation. 
 
 We live now, ladies and gentlemen, in 191 1, in 
 very fine-strung times, which have — and for this 
 I, for one, cannot profess to blame them — long 
 since grown tired of statistics of merely material 
 progress. Railways, in our jaded minds, are 
 unpleasantly associated with strikes, newspapers 
 with libel actions, libraries with dust, and education 
 with rates. Old-fashioned raptures about progress 
 are voted middle-class — a dreadful thing to be — 
 provincial, "awful," vulgar, early Victorian. Of 
 all these old-fashioned raptures, John Bright, in 
 many delicate circles, is considered by virtue of 
 his supreme genius to be the sacred vates or poet. 
 
 Bright's imagination was undoubtedly im- 
 mensely affected by the spectacle of the world as 
 it was unfolding under his eyes. Remember that 
 he was born — we cannot forget that to-night — 
 a hundred years ago. The first time he went to 
 London he travelled outside a stage-coach called 
 " Peveril of the Peak." Why a coach with four 
 horses should be called by the name of the very 
 slowest of Sir Walter Scott's novels I do not know. 
 
 It started from Market Street, Manchester, at 
 eight o'clock in the evening, and reached London 
 at five o'clock the next afternoon. This first 
 journey of Bright's was made in the famous year 
 1832, and by a happy chance on the very night 
 that this great orator that was to be was driving 
 through England, the House of Lords was sitting up
 
 364 JOHN BRIGHT 
 
 debating the Reform Bill, which was carried by a 
 majority of nine two hours after Bright saw London 
 for the first time. He was twenty-one hours on 
 the road, and his outside seat cost him ^3 los. 
 
 Now let us be fair to this great man. Were not 
 George and Robert Stephenson great men worthy 
 to be sung or sounded in eloquent praise ? Were 
 not the engineers and scientific mechanics who 
 carried out this mighty innovation, were not the 
 Manchester and Liverpool merchants, who planked 
 down the money, huge sums, necessary to fight 
 the landed interest for years in the committee 
 rooms of both Houses of Parliament — were they 
 not great citizens well entitled to the honour of 
 succeeding generations ? 
 
 It was, indeed, a mighty and a sudden change 
 which we people living in these days — except 
 when there is a strike, when the most dilettante 
 critic is the first to shout out — perhaps find it 
 rather difficult to appreciate. Mr. Gladstone was 
 fond, in conversation, of recording the fact that 
 it had taken Sir Robert Peel on a famous occasion 
 in 1834 — when he was in a tremendous hurry to 
 form an Administration — just as long a time, 
 namely twelve days, to make his celebrated 
 journey from Rome to London as it had taken 
 the Emperor Constantine 1500 years before him 
 to make precisely the same journey, travelling by 
 the same methods and the same route. 
 
 I do not vouch for the details of this anecdote, 
 for Gibbon, who is my only authority in such 
 matters, tells me that the Emperor Constantine, 
 who was most anxious to come to York to get a 
 farewell blessing of his father, and also the Empire,
 
 JOHN BRIGHT 365 
 
 did not start from Rome at all, but further away, 
 from Nikomedia in Asia Minor, that he did not 
 travel by way of Rome but through what we now 
 call Turkey, along the shores of the Adriatic, by 
 Trieste, Switzerland, and across France to Bou- 
 logne. However that may be, the fact remains 
 that an English Prime Minister, or would-be 
 Prime Minister, in 1834, could not travel to form 
 an Administration any quicker than could the 
 Emperor Constantine at the beginning of the 
 fourth century in making practically the same 
 journey in order to inherit a great Empire. 
 
 That brings home to our minds how stagnant 
 the world had been in this great matter of loco- 
 motion. Was it nothing to witness this mighty 
 transformation both by land and sea ? When in 
 1836 John Bright, on a steamboat, visited the 
 shores and islands of the Mediterranean, that 
 inland sea which " moans with memories," was 
 his imagination not to be stirred by the fact that 
 the boat he was in, on arriving at these islands 
 was at once made the subject of intense interest 
 and inquiry ? All the islanders ran down and 
 flocked round it to see what wonderful thing it 
 was, just as tens of thousands of years earlier their 
 predecessors may have done round the first sea- 
 going vessel with sails. Are not these great trans- 
 formations worthy of the poet's mind ? Or is 
 imagination to be confined entirely to books ? 
 Was telegraphy not worth a word ? 
 
 Bright was greatly aff^ected by ail these marvels, 
 these novelties, not particularly on the scientific 
 side, for like Lord Derby and Mr. Gladstone he 
 belonged to the pre-scientific age, but on the
 
 366 JOHN BRIGHT 
 
 broadly human side. When Bright thought of a 
 line of rails running through the silent land, gleam- 
 ing in the sun, glistering in the rain, he was not 
 thinking of fares and freights. His imagination 
 drew him out to think of the husband and the wife, 
 the son or daughter hurrying home along these 
 same rails quickly and cheaply to some sick 
 chamber, it may be to receive some final farewell, 
 or to some family gathering or festivity. 
 
 I greatly admire — and undoubtedly I ask you 
 to do the same — I admire Bright's hearty con- 
 tempt and indifference for the dilettante. He had 
 a good word to say even for photography, and for 
 those woebegone volumes, at least they are now 
 mostly woebegone, with cracked bindings and 
 stained morocco — the old carte-de-visite album, a 
 melancholy object in most of our homes. But 
 Bright, speaking here in Rochdale in 1877, threw 
 this broad human light on the subject. He said: 
 
 Now, even in the humblest cottage there may be portraits 
 of those who are loved and absent, a thing which before was 
 impossible. 
 
 " And there may be," he goes on, for he was a 
 most courageous speaker, " there may be a little 
 book in which all the members of the family are 
 represented, and which it is often pleasing for the 
 family themselves or for their friends to examine 
 and to admire." And he concludes, " so that we 
 find this: that science comes to us like the air, 
 and the light, and the warmth, and the sunshine, 
 and the shower." In Bright's hands, and on his 
 manly tongue, these themes of material progress 
 became no vulgar trade-catalogues of rival manu- 
 facturers grabbing at gain, but told a stirring tale
 
 JOHN BRIGHT 367 
 
 of human life and enterprise and energy and the 
 joys that are " in widest commonalty spread." 
 
 It now only remains for me to enumerate the 
 great causes and events with which Bright's name 
 is inseparably associated in our history, for you 
 at once to recognise how impossible it would have 
 been for me, at all events, to deal with them one 
 by one within the compass of an address. To have 
 done so would have been not only to inflict on you 
 an unreasonable portion of my weariness, but 
 completely to have failed either to do justice to 
 the subject or to the varied energies of the great 
 orator in whose honour we are met. Prominent 
 among those great causes are the repeal of the 
 Corn Laws, the Crimean War, the American Civil 
 War, and the anti-slavery movement, the problem 
 of India, the problem of Ireland, Parliamentary 
 reform, and the doctrine of a free church in a free 
 state. This list is incomplete, but it is long enough 
 to prove my point : how impossible it would have 
 been for me to do justice to them. 
 
 The Anti-Corn Law League has for me all the 
 fascination that belongs to a genuine thought- 
 movement as opposed to, or as distinguished from, 
 a mere political agitation — useful as political 
 agitations may often be. In this movement, which 
 filled the trying years 1838 to 1845, Bright and 
 Cobden, Cobden and Bright, were twin brethren. 
 It is childish — because impossible — ^to hope to do 
 justice to all the soldiers who take part in an 
 intellectual conflict like this. The reputations of 
 all great leaders of revolt are largely based on 
 injustice to the claims of men whose brains these 
 leaders have ruthlessly ransacked, whose best
 
 368 JOHN BRIGHT 
 
 things they have cahnly appropriated. Why, if it 
 comes to that, the real founder of that remarkable 
 Oxford Movement — the Tractarian Movement — 
 which was running its course at this very time, was 
 not John Henry Newman of Oriel, but a Cambridge 
 man' — my own University — Hugh James Rose of 
 Trinity College. It is impossible in the history of 
 a great movement to do justice to all its great men. 
 Bright's affection and admiration for Cobden 
 — whose spirit, so he tells us in his old age, visited 
 him every night in his dreams and consoled him 
 — was romantic and unbounded, which in a man 
 little given to admiration is most significant. In 
 the address at Bradford in 1877, when Cobden's 
 statue was unveiled, Bright's eloquence seemed 
 to reach its very highest level, and produced one of 
 the world's masterpieces, alike of composition and 
 of feeling. From this address I will take a well- 
 known passage, descriptive of the great movement I 
 have placed first in my list of Bright's activities : 
 
 Now do not suppose [says Bright] that I wish you to imagine 
 that he and I, when I say " we," were the only persons engaged 
 in this great question. We were not even the first, though 
 afterwards, perhaps, we became the foremost before the 
 pubhc; but there were others before us, and we were joined 
 not by scores, but by hundreds and by thousands, and after- 
 wards by countless multitudes, and finally famine itself, 
 against which we had warred, joined us, and a great minister 
 was converted, and minorities became majorities, and finally 
 the barrier was entirely thrown down. And since then, though 
 there has been suffering, and much suffering, in many homes 
 in England, yet no wife and no mother and no little child 
 has been starved to death as the result of a famine made by 
 law. Now [he proceeds] if you cast your eyes over the globe 
 what is it you see there ? Look at Canada. Look at the United 
 States, whether on the Atlantic seaboard or on the Pacific 
 slope. Look at Chili. Look at the Australian colonies. Look 
 at the great and rich province of Bengal. Look on the shores 
 of the Black Sea and the Baltic, wherever the rain falls,
 
 JOHN BRIGHT 369 
 
 wherever the sun shines, wherever there are markets and 
 granaries and harvest fields, there there are men and women 
 everywhere gathering that which comes to this country for 
 the food of our people, and our fleets traverse every sea and 
 visit every port and bring us the food which only about thirty 
 years ago the laws of this civilised and Christian country 
 denied to its people. You find it in Holy Writ that " the 
 earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof." We have put 
 Holy Writ into an Act of Parliament, and since then, of that 
 fulness every man and woman and httle child in this country 
 may freely and abundantly partake. 
 
 Of the Crimean War I need say nothing, for it 
 has long stood condemned at the bar of history. 
 Avoidable in its origin, ill-conceived in its strategy, 
 ill-executed in its operation, wasteful of blood 
 and treasure, it settled nothing and got rid of 
 nothing. I should be a happier man than I am 
 to-night, could I believe that such blunders, 
 bringing in their train even worse disasters, were 
 incapable of repetition. 
 
 The American Civil War, the most stupendous 
 event of the last century, excited in the breast of 
 John Bright contending hatreds. He hated war 
 as few men did, but he hated human slavery even 
 more, and he believed the two were inextricably 
 woven together in this direful calamity. Bright 
 was perhaps the first well-known Englishman to 
 love the United States of America, " the great 
 Republic of the West," as he used to call it. He 
 had bathed it in his marvellous fancy, and he 
 had painted it with all the colours of the rainbow. 
 To see it armed for mutual slaughter was indeed 
 a maddening spectacle. 
 
 Feeling ran high in those days. I remember a 
 tradesman in Liverpool being ordered by the 
 police to remove a portrait of Lincoln from his 
 window because all good Tories stopped and spat 
 
 I 2 A
 
 370 JOHN BRIGHT 
 
 at it as they passed. And the stormiest meeting 
 I ever heard of was one in the Philharmonic Hall 
 in the same city, or town, as it was then well 
 content to be called, where Henry Ward Beecher 
 vainly attempted for the space of an hour and a 
 half to address an audience of cotton brokers and 
 their clerks who were only waiting for a declaration 
 of war with the Northern States to cheer themselves 
 hoarse. Bright's part in this great transaction was 
 a noble one. It has earned him the affection of 
 the " great Repubhc of the West " and of her 
 children, and the respect of every intelligent man 
 here at home. 
 
 To India and her affairs Bright probably gave 
 more study than to any other subject. He was 
 falsely accused of desiring to withdraw from India. 
 He never desired anything of the sort. He wished 
 to see India well and sensibly governed, and his 
 word of advice was " decentralise." We may 
 perhaps hear more of it. 
 
 As to Ireland, the most illuminating speeches 
 on this subject in early days, and in some respects 
 they have never been equalled, were made by 
 Bright and Disraeli. And my advice to all young 
 people preparing for the fray — on one side or the 
 other — is to study these speeches of those two men 
 on that subject, for they are lit up by genius, 
 sympathy, and understanding. Bright had clearly 
 grasped before any other Englishman the great 
 truth that the land problem lay at the root of 
 Irish difficulties, and he has the honour, and it is 
 a great honour, of being the pioneer of the great 
 policy of land purchase in Ireland. He also won 
 once for all the affection of the Irish race by his
 
 JOHN BRIGHT 371 
 
 early recognition of the place America had come 
 to occupy in their sad hearts. 
 
 Speaking in Dublin, a city which too seldom 
 has had the chance of listening to great English 
 orators, he said: 
 
 You will recollect that when the ancient Hebrew prophet 
 prayed in his captivity he prayed with his window open 
 towards Jerusalem. You know that the followers of Mahomet, 
 when they pray, turn their faces towards Mecca. When the 
 Irish peasant asks for food, and freedom, and blessing, liis 
 eye follows the setting sun, the aspirations of his heart reach 
 beyond the wide Atlantic, and in spirit he grasps hands with 
 the great Republic of the West. 
 
 Who is wise, says Holy Scripture, understandeth 
 these things. 
 
 I have now used up much of my time and your 
 patience — yet how much have I left unsaid ! Not 
 a word have I uttered about peace or retrench- 
 ment, or about that Parliamentary vote to which 
 Bright all his days attached an importance that 
 seemed sheer madness to his great contemporary, 
 Thomas Carlyle. That one generation should 
 differ from another is natural enough, else were 
 we sterilised, but it adds terribly to the bewilder- 
 ment of simple folk when they find, as they too 
 often do, that the foremost men of each generation 
 think each other stark, raving mad. 
 
 Parting company with a man like Bright, who 
 held positive opinions and expressed them clearly, 
 vehemently, and without reserve, who poured 
 himself out in so many great strifes, who practised 
 no economies of that truth in which he believed, 
 and never concealed for a moment his deep-rooted 
 conviction that the causes with which he identified 
 himself were bound to prevail, it is impossible to
 
 372 JOHN BRIGHT 
 
 prevent a certain note of sadness entering into 
 our farewell. Were Bright here to-day reading 
 our newspapers what would he say? His dreams 
 have not yet come true. Retrenchment ? I dare 
 not mention the amount of last year's estimates. 
 Peace ? O'er the restless waves of what inland sea 
 or mighty ocean does peace securely spread her 
 wings ? And as for the great Republic of the West, 
 she has travelled far along a very different path 
 from the one that Bright's glowing fancy painted 
 for her. What to-dayare the prospects of humanity ? 
 What chances has she ? This is an age which takes 
 upon itself to sneer at theology, and no doubt if a 
 theology becomes incredible, there is an end to 
 it; but theology, alone of the subjects which claim 
 the grave attention of mortals, does at all events 
 proffer an answer to this searching question. But 
 although the devil is not dead, as the cheerful 
 optimist in Charles Reade's Cloister and the Hearth 
 used to go about declaring he was — though the 
 devil is not dead, there is no reason why we should 
 lose courage. The world, for all we know, may yet 
 be in the nursery. I am sure its inmates are childish 
 enough to afford good grounds for that beUef. 
 John Bright's thought, all his thoughts and all 
 his hopes, and all his dreams, though necessarily 
 hmited in their range and, it may well be, inade- 
 quate in their scope, were tinged with the glory 
 that comes streaming from the Master Light, 
 whom we may address in the inspired language of 
 the great poet dear to Bright himself, Wordsworth: 
 
 Uphold us— cherish — and have power to make 
 Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
 Of the eternal silence : truths that wake, 
 To perish never.
 
 COBDENi 
 
 [The Nation, January 1919) 
 
 MR. HOBSON begins this interesting, 
 illuminating, though of necessity (con- 
 sidering the ravaged times in which we 
 live) most melancholy book, with an image, so 
 pat and yet so fanciful, as at once to set me off 
 thinking, on my own account, almost before I 
 had begun to read. He introduces his subject by 
 saying, " The process of ' settlement ' to which 
 the reputation of a great public man is subjected 
 after he has passed away, is almost inevitably 
 attended by ' grave misrepresentations.' " It was 
 this use of the word " settlement " that played 
 the mischief with my fancy. The " settlement " 
 and simile which Mr. Hobson had in mind when 
 he penned his opening sentence was not, of course, 
 the kind of settlement which a man sometimes 
 makes on his marriage, or that other kind that 
 determines in what parish workhouse he is doomed 
 to die, but the sort of settlement which ensues 
 where the soil, which has been made the foundation 
 of a building, gives way and sinks, either under 
 the weight of the super-imposed structure, or on 
 account of some shifting of the sands below. 
 
 It is, indeed, a striking simile which works 
 devastation all around. Mr. Cobden's settlement 
 
 1 Richard Cobden, the International Man. By J. A. Hobson (Fisher 
 Unwin). 
 
 373
 
 374 COBDEN 
 
 is not so obvious as that which has befallen many 
 of his distinguished contemporaries in politics, 
 literature, philosophy, and art. " Creeds change, 
 rites pass. No altar standeth whole." It is not 
 only death that makes the difference, though death 
 does make a mighty difference, altering, almost 
 at once, the " point of view." No! it is the passage 
 of time and the course of events which, day by 
 day, with the moving hand of the dial, and the 
 things that happen, reduce dead men's reputations 
 by antiquating the arguments they were never 
 weary of employing, by falsifying their most 
 confident predictions, and, most of all, perhaps, 
 by opening up new markets, not only for goods 
 and manufactures, but for thought and specu- 
 lation, and thus diverting the old routes along 
 which these dead men were not only content 
 but compelled to travel. 
 
 Settlement or no settlement, Cobden has proved 
 himself in these mutable days to be " a good 
 stayer." He was born one hundred and fourteen 
 years ago. He died in 1865. Lord Morley has 
 written (in 1 881) his life in two volumes, and 
 now in 19 19 appears a book all about him, tingling 
 with interest and vitality. This is a long spell 
 for a " public man." What in the meantime has 
 become of his ancient enemy, Lord Palmerston, 
 who in 1857, when flushed with the glories of the 
 Chinese War and the Crimean War, not only 
 flouted " Cobden, Bright and Co." at the polls, 
 but, so it was confidently predicted, had driven 
 those pests out of public life ? In the following 
 year, however, " Cobden, Bright and Co." re- 
 appeared in Parliament, and, in Cobden's case,
 
 COBDEN 375 
 
 unopposed. We are all much too apt to mistake 
 incidents for events. 
 
 This " study " of Mr. Hobson's is wholly con- 
 cerned, as its sub-title indicates, with Cobden's 
 Foreign Policy (best described as " anti-Palmer- 
 ston ") with his far-reaching conceptions of 
 international relationships, with his hatred of 
 Foreign Office traditions, with his doctrine of 
 " non-intervention," and with his projects for 
 avoiding war altogether or rendering it as difficult 
 as possible. 
 
 Of the triumphant Cobden, the Free Trader, 
 and successful Anti-Corn-Law agitator, we hear 
 not a word, except an occasional complaint from 
 Cobden himself that the agitation succeeded so 
 well as to have exhausted all the courage and 
 initiative of Manchester. I infer from Mr. Hobson's 
 silence on the subject of Free Trade that he is of 
 opinion that, though Tariff Reform is installed in 
 Downing Street, yet as ministers are pledged to 
 leave food and the raw materials of British in- 
 dustries untaxed, a Tariff Reform like that is as 
 little likely to threaten the health of our economics 
 as can a married clergy ever really endanger our 
 Protestant Establishment. Otherwise, I do not 
 think Mr. Hobson could have been induced, not- 
 withstanding his sub-title, to have held his peace 
 throughout four hundred pages. 
 
 Cobden expounded his Foreign Policy again 
 and again during the thirties, the forties, and 
 the fifties in pamphlets, which had a wide circu- 
 lation, and produced at the time a profound 
 educational effect, not only on the minds of the 
 middle classes and the reading artisan, but also
 
 Zl6 COBDEN 
 
 on those of their children, who, though they may 
 not have read these pamphlets for themselves, 
 had to listen to their substance related to them 
 by parental lips at the family board. Cobden was 
 not only one of the most persuasive speakers to 
 a town-bred audience that ever lived, but he was 
 also a most persuasive writer, and his readers 
 were numerous and receptive. Like somebody's 
 whisky, he had a " gran' grip o' the watter " 
 — e.g.^ I derive my detestation of Palmerston 
 and of all the ways of that double-dealing man 
 from Cobden's pamphlets, though they only reached 
 me at second-hand. 
 
 Cobden's methods were thus more instructive 
 than Bright's, and ever in the later days of his 
 " Anti-Palmerston " campaign he had a striking 
 success as a teacher. His " class " may not have 
 been composed of such " influential " persons 
 as Delane's in the Times, whose readers then 
 included everybody in receipt of the taxpayer's 
 money, nor could Cobden appear every morning 
 on the breakfast table; but for all that he was a 
 formidable rival even to the Times, and as Time and 
 Reason have, oftener than not, shown themselves, 
 to have been on his side, Cobden has struggled out 
 of the fray, leaving less of his wool on the hedges 
 than any other English politician, editor, or 
 publicist of his day and generation. 
 
 Teachers of their fellow men can never expect 
 to be popular anywhere, and least of all in England, 
 where to be didactic is to be damned, but as good 
 teachers seldom aim at popularity they need not 
 grumble if they miss it. 
 
 Cobden was too bent on immediate persuasion
 
 COBDEN 377 
 
 ever to be offensively didactic. Yet in his hearty 
 and noble detestation of Palmerston's wars and 
 ways he incurred great unpopularity by using 
 language about England that went far to sup- 
 port the allegation, in itself untrue, that he was 
 one of those men who, in Chatham's language, 
 had devoured the strange herb which makes 
 men forget their native country. For example, 
 he writes : 
 
 " We shall do no good until we can bring home to the 
 conviction and consciences of men the fact that, as in the 
 slave trade, we had surpassed in guilt the whole world, so in 
 foreign wars we have been the most aggressive, quarrelsome, 
 warlike and bloody nation under the sun " (p. 90). Again: 
 " I wish we had a map, with a red spot printed upon those 
 places by land and sea where we have fought battles since 
 1688. It would be seen at a glance that we have (unlike any 
 other nation under the sun), been fighting foreign enemies 
 upon every part of the earth's surface, excepting our own 
 territory — thus showing that we have been the most warlike 
 and aggressive people that ever existed " (p. 89). 
 
 This is a jaundiced view to take of our old friend 
 the " Weary Titan," groaning along under the too 
 vast orb of his fate. No one can accuse England 
 of treating war as her main industry, and as for 
 being more bloody, more aggressive, and more 
 quarrelsome than any other nation, that hardly 
 seems likely. But, as Cobden candidly admitted, 
 Palmerston had spoiled his temper — so irritated 
 him as almost to force him into taking up an 
 attitude towards war which his general doctrine 
 of non-intervention in no way demanded. Cobden, 
 though no doubt he hated war, as usually waged, 
 more than do most Christians, was no Quaker. 
 What do we find him writing to his Northern friend, 
 Charles Sumner, during the American Civil War ? 
 " It is nothing but your great power that has kept
 
 378 COBDEN 
 
 the hands of Europe off you." A saying only too 
 true, as we all know to our shame, but how much 
 is involved in its truth ! 
 
 Cobden sought peace, as President Wilson is 
 doing, through a League of Nations. Before our 
 Russian War began he wrote : " I should appeal 
 not only to Germany, but to all the States, small 
 as well as great, on the Continent, for such a union 
 as would prevent the possibility of any act of 
 hostility from a common enemy." 
 
 So long ago as 1849 (before President Wilson 
 was born), Cobden attended a Peace Congress in 
 Paris, which set itself seriously to consider how 
 best to promote the cause of Universal Peace. 
 France, Germany, Belgium, England, and the 
 United States were represented by men at least as 
 eminent as any of those who are to-day making 
 it impossible to get a bed in Paris. Victor Hugo, 
 France incarnate, the mighty lord " of human 
 tears," was its President. M. de Girardin, the most 
 famous editor in Europe, Lamartine, who was 
 once, at all events, a name to conjure with, 
 ChevaHer, Say, and Bastiat, political economists 
 of renown, and many others, unanimously recom- 
 mended the friends of peace to prepare pubhc 
 opinion in their respective countries for the forma- 
 tion of a Congress of Nations, to revise the existing 
 International Law, and to constitute a High 
 Tribunal for the decision of controversies among 
 nations. In support of their objects the Congress, 
 acting, I am sure, in all good faith and sincerity, 
 called to their aid " the representatives of the Press, 
 so potent to diffuse truth, and also all ministers 
 of rehgion, whose holy office it is to encourage
 
 COBDEN 379 
 
 goodwill among men." This in August, 1849! 
 What mockery it now sounds! The coup d'etat^ 
 the Italian War; the Chinese War; the Crimean 
 War; the Battle of Sadowa; the Franco-German 
 War, bringing in its train the horrors of the 
 Commune; the Boer War; the last War, and the 
 present state of Europe! We have, indeed, supped 
 full of horrors since 1849, despite all the efforts 
 of a truth-diffusing Press, and the pulpit-eloquence 
 of the ordained preachers of good-will among men. 
 
 None the less, " Hope springs eternal in the 
 human breast," and it is possible to meet in that 
 same Paris to-day and discuss a League of Nations 
 without even an augural grin appearing upon our 
 speaking countenances. Cobden was on the right 
 lines all his life. 
 
 It is perhaps worth remarking that of the three 
 heroes of orthodox evangelical Nonconformity in 
 those days, Cobden, Bright, and (a little later) 
 Gladstone, not one of them had any sympathy 
 with the distinctive opinions of their adorers. 
 
 Cobden, like many men of his order of mind, was 
 a solitary thinker, but little affected by the con- 
 tagion of the crowd, even when the crowd was 
 composed of those who were disposed to agree 
 with him. As with Charles Lamb's " true Cale- 
 donian " you could not " cry halves " to anything 
 Cobden found. " He does not find but brings 
 and unloads his stock of ideas in perfect order 
 and completeness." 
 
 In a notice of this very book of Mr. Hobson's 
 in the Times, I found the reviewer contrasting 
 Cobden's somewhat sluggish adhesion to the cause 
 of the North in the early days of the American
 
 38o COBDEN 
 
 Civil War, with the " illustrious " conduct of 
 Bright, who espoused it without doubt or demur 
 from the very first. " The Course of Events " is, 
 indeed, a great newspaper god, above all other gods, 
 and works marvels on editorial minds, but as I 
 read the Times I could not help wondering what 
 would have happened to me, who, as a small boy 
 in Liverpool, was pinched black and blue at school 
 for " sticking up " for Lincoln, had I been able 
 in 1862 to carry my wounds to Printing House 
 Square, and asked for sympathy for my suflFerings 
 in that glorious cause. Still, it must be just a Httle 
 dull to be always not a day but, at least, thirty 
 years after the fair. 
 
 Cobden's correspondence with Henry Richard, 
 now for the first time published, is described by 
 Mr. Hobson as a process of " feeding the Star 
 (a paper of that name) with material chiefly on 
 foreign and imperial affairs." To keep " feeding " 
 a partisan print with its daily bread is an occupa- 
 tion which cannot long be carried on without 
 moral and intellectual damage, and the publication 
 of the process is to subject Cobden to a very severe 
 test. He stands it better than could most men; 
 although, occasionally, he does drop a hint or two 
 from which even Lord Beaverbrook might con- 
 descend to learn, as to the best way of indoctrinating 
 a stupid public with ideas from which had they 
 been less cunningly introduced that same stupid 
 public would instinctively have shrunk. 
 
 In conclusion, I suspect there will always be 
 some fine folk whose nerves Cobden will occasionally 
 fret. The idols of the Counting House are less 
 attractive than (to employ Bacon's imagery) those
 
 COBDEN 381 
 
 of the Tribe or of the Theatre; but these critics 
 ought, in justice to Cobden, to remember that 
 even if this " painful warrior famoused for fight," 
 who, sixty years ago and more, pleaded before 
 Europe the cause of a League of Nations, had some 
 scars hidden beneath his shining armour, he gained 
 those in the days of his strenuous middle age, 
 when he fought and won a glorious and resounding 
 victory over a highly-placed and well-endowed 
 band of greedy monopolists.
 
 DISRAELI EX RELATIONE SIR WILLIAM 
 
 FRASER 
 
 1905 
 
 THE late Sir William Eraser was not, 1 
 have been told, a popular person in that 
 society about which he thought so much, 
 and his book, Disraeli and His Day, did not succeed 
 in attracting much of the notice of the general 
 reader, and failed, so I, at least, have been made 
 to understand, to win a verdict of approval from 
 the really well informed. 
 
 I consider the book a very good one, in the 
 sense of being valuable. Whatever your mood may 
 be, that of the moralist, cynic, satirist, humorist, 
 whether you love, pity, or despise your fellow- 
 man, here is grist for your mill. It feeds the mind. 
 
 Although in form the book is but a stringing 
 together of stories, incidents, and aphorisms, still 
 the whole produces a distinct effect. To state 
 what that effect is would be, I suppose, the higher 
 criticism. It is not altogether disagreeable; it is 
 decidedly amusing; it is clever and somewhat 
 contemptible. Sir William Eraser was a baronet 
 who thought well of his order. He desiderated a 
 tribunal to determine the right to the title, and 
 he opined that the courtesy prefix of " Honour- 
 able," which once, it appears, belonged to baronets, 
 should be restored to them. Apart from these 
 opinions, ridiculous and peculiar, Sir William 
 Eraser stands revealed in this volume as cast 
 
 382
 
 DISRAELI 383 
 
 in a familiar mould. The words " gentleman," 
 " White's," " Society," often flow from his pen, 
 and we may be sure were engraven on his heart. 
 He had seen a world wrecked. When he was young, 
 so he tells his readers, the world consisted of at 
 least three, and certainly not more than five, hun- 
 dred persons who were accustomed night after 
 night during the season to make their appearance 
 at a certain number of houses, which are affection- 
 ately enumerated. A new face at any one of these 
 gatherings immediately attracted attention, as, 
 indeed, it is easy to believe it would. " Anything 
 for a change," as somebody observes in Pickwick. 
 This is the atmosphere of the book, and Sir 
 William breathes in it very pleasantly. Endowed 
 by Nature with a retentive memory and a literary 
 taste, active if singular, he may be discovered in 
 his own pages moving up and down, in and out of 
 society, supplying and correcting quotations, and 
 gratifying the vanity of distinguished authors by 
 remembering their own writings better than they 
 did themselves. The book makes one clearly com- 
 prehend what a monstrous clever fellow the rank 
 and file of the Tory party must have felt Sir 
 William Eraser to be. This, however, is only 
 background. In the front of the picture we have 
 the mysterious outlines, the strange personality, 
 struggling between the bizarre and the romantic, 
 of " the Jew," as big George Bentinck was ever 
 accustomed to denominate his leader. Sir William 
 Eraser's Disraeli is a very different figure from Sir 
 Stafford Northcote's. The myth about the pocket 
 Sophocles is rudely exploded. Sir William is 
 certain that Disraeli could not have construed a
 
 384 DISRAELI 
 
 chapter of the Greek Testament. He found such 
 mythology as he required where many an honest 
 fellow has found it before him — in Lempriere's 
 Dictionary, His French accent, as Sir William 
 records it, was most satisfactory, and a conclusive 
 proof of his bona fides. Disraeli, it is clear, cared 
 as little for literature as he did for art. He admired 
 Gray, as every man with a sense for epithet must; 
 he studied Junius, whose style, so Sir William Fraser 
 believes, he surpassed in his " Runnymede " letters. 
 Sir William Fraser kindly explains the etymology of 
 this strange word " Runnymede," as he also does 
 that of " Parliament," which he says is " Parliamo 
 mente " (Let us speak our minds). Sir William 
 clearly possessed the learning denied to his chief. 
 
 Beyond apparently imposing upon Sir Stafford 
 Northcote, Disraeli himself never made any vain 
 pretensions to be devoted to pursuits for which 
 he did not care a rap. He once dreamt of an epic 
 poem, and his early ambition urged him a step or 
 two in that direction, but his critical faculty, 
 which, despite all his monstrosities of taste, was 
 vital, restrained him from making a fool of himself, 
 and he forswore the muse, puffed the prostitute 
 away, and carried his very saleable wares to another 
 market, where his efforts were crowned with prodi- 
 gious success. Sir William Fraser introduces his 
 great man to us as observing, in reply to a question, 
 that revenge was the passion which gives pleasure 
 the latest. A man, he continued, will enjoy that 
 when even avarice has ceased to please. As a 
 matter of fact, Disraeli himself was neither avari- 
 cious nor revengeful, and, as far as one can judge, 
 was never tempted to be either. This is the fatal
 
 DISRAELI 385 
 
 defect of almost all Disraeli's aphorisms: they 
 are dead words, whilst the words of a true aphor- 
 ism have veins filled with the life of their utterer. 
 Nothing of this sort ever escaped the lips of our 
 modern Sphinx. If he had any faiths, any deep 
 convictions, any rooted principles, he held his 
 tongue about them. He was. Sir William tells 
 us, an indolent man. It is doubtful whether he 
 ever did, apart from the preparation and delivery 
 of his speeches, what would be called by a pro- 
 fessional man a hard day's work in his life. He 
 had courage, wit, insight, instinct, prevision, and a 
 thorough persuasion that he perfectly understood 
 the materials he had to work upon and the tools 
 within his reach. Perhaps no man ever gauged 
 more accurately or more profoundly despised 
 that " world " Sir William Fraser so pathetically 
 laments. For folly, egotism, vanity, conceit, and 
 stupidity, he had an amazing eye. He could not, 
 owing to his short sight, read men's faces across 
 the floor of the House, but he did not require the 
 aid of any optic nerve to see the petty secrets of 
 their souls. His best sayings have men's weak- 
 nesses for their text. Sir William's book gives 
 many excellent examples. One laughs throughout. 
 Sir William would have us believe that in later 
 life Disraeli clung affectionately to dullness — to 
 gentle dullness. He did not want to be surrounded 
 by wits. He had been one himself in his youth, 
 and he questioned their sincerity. It would almost 
 appear from passages in the book that Disraeli 
 found even Sir William Fraser too pungent for 
 him. Once, we are told, the impenetrable Prime 
 Minister quailed before Sir William's reproachful 
 
 I 2 B
 
 386 DISRAELI 
 
 oratory. The story is not of a cock and a bull, but 
 of a question put in the House of Commons by 
 Sir William, who was snubbed by the Home 
 Secretary, who was cheered by Disraeli. This was 
 intolerable, and accordingly next day, being, as 
 good luck would have it, a Friday, when, as all 
 men and members know, " it is in the power of any 
 member to bring forward any topic he may choose," 
 Sir William naturally chose the topic nearest to 
 his heart, and " said a few words on my wrongs." 
 
 During my performance I watched Disraeli narrowly. I 
 could not see his face, but I noticed that whenever I became 
 in any way disagreeable — in short, whenever my words really 
 bit — they were invariably followed by one movement. Sitting 
 as he always did with his right knee over his left, whenever 
 the words touched him he moved the pendent leg twice or 
 three times, then curved his foot upwards. I could observe 
 no other sign of emotion, but this was distinct. Some years 
 afterwards, on a somewhat more important occasion at the 
 
 Conference at Berlin, a great German philosopher, Herr , 
 
 went to Berlin on purpose to study Disraeli's character. He 
 said afterwards that he was most struck by the more than 
 Indian stoicism which Disraeli showed. To this there was 
 one exception. " Like all men of his race, he has one sign of 
 emotion which never fails to show itself — the movement of 
 the leg that is crossed over the other, and of the foot! " The 
 person who told me this had never heard me hint, nor had 
 anyone, that I had observed this peculiar symptom on the 
 earlier occasion to which I have referred. 
 
 Statesmen of Jewish descent, with a reputation 
 for stoicism to preserve, would do well to learn 
 from this story not to swing their crossed leg when 
 tired. The great want about Mr. Disraeli is some- 
 thing to hang the countless anecdotes about him 
 upon. Most remarkable men have some pre- 
 dominant feature of character round which you 
 can build your general conception of them, or, at 
 all events, there has been some great incident in 
 their lives for ever connected with their names.
 
 DISRAELI 387 
 
 and your imagination mixes the man and the 
 event together. Who can think of Peel without re- 
 membering the Corn Laws and the reverberating 
 sentence: "I shall leave a name execrated by 
 every monopolist who, for less honourable motives, 
 clamours for Protection because it conduces to his 
 own individual benefit; but it may be that I shall 
 leave a name sometimes remembered with ex- 
 pressions of good-will in the abode of those whose 
 lot it is to labour and to earn their daily bread 
 with the sweat of their brow, when they shall 
 recruit their exhausted strength with abundant 
 and untaxed food, the sweeter because it is no 
 longer leavened with a sense of injustice." But 
 round what are our memories of Disraeli to cluster ? 
 Sir William Fraser speaks rapturously of his won- 
 drous mind and of his intellect, but where is pos- 
 terity to look for evidences of either ? Certainly 
 not in Sir William's book, which shows us a 
 wearied wit and nothing more. Carlyle once asked, 
 " How long will John Bull permit this absurd 
 monkey " — meaning Mr. Disraeli — " to dance upon 
 his stomach ? " The question was coarsely put, 
 but there is nothing in Sir William's book to make 
 one wonder it should have been asked. Mr. Disraeli 
 lived to offer Carlyle the Grand Cross of the Order 
 of the Bath, and that, in Sir William's opinion, 
 is enough to dispose of Carlyle's vituperation; 
 but, after all, the Grand Cross is no answer to 
 anything except an application for it. 
 
 A great many other people are made to cross 
 Sir William Eraser's stage. His comments upon 
 them are lively, independent, and original. He 
 liked Cobden and hated Bright. The reason for
 
 388 DISRAELI 
 
 this he makes quite plain. He thinks he detected 
 in Cobden a deprecatory manner — a recognition 
 of the sublime truth that he, Richard Cobden, 
 had not been half so well educated as the mob of 
 Tories he was addressing. Bright, on the other 
 hand, was fat and rude, and thought that most 
 country gentlemen and town-bred wits were either 
 fools or fribbles. This was intolerable. Here was 
 a man who not only could not have belonged to 
 the " world," but honestly did not wish to, and 
 was persuaded — the gross fellow — that he and his 
 world were better in every respect than the exclu- 
 sive circles which listened to Sir William Eraser's 
 bons mots and tags from the poets. Certainly 
 there was nothing deprecatory about John Bright. 
 He could be quite as insolent in his way as any 
 aristocrat in his. He had a habit, we are told, of 
 slowly getting up and walking out of the House 
 in the middle of Mr. Disraeli's speeches, and just 
 when that ingenious orator was leading up to a 
 carefully prepared point, and then immediately 
 returning behind the Speaker's chair. If this is 
 true, it was perhaps rude, but nobody can deny 
 that it is a Tory dodge of indicating disdain. 
 What was really irritating about Mr. Bright was 
 that his disdain was genuine. He did think very 
 little of the Tory party, and he did not care one 
 straw for the opinion of society. He positively 
 would not have cared to have been made a baronet. 
 Sir William Eraser seems to have been really fond 
 of Disraeli, and the very last time he met his great 
 man in the Carlton Club he told him a story too 
 broad to be printed. The great man pronounced 
 it admirable, and passed on his weary way.
 
 GLADSTONE ^ 
 
 1903 
 
 THE first impulse of every kind-hearted man 
 on completing his reading of Mr. Morley's 
 great book must be to congratulate the 
 biographer on his restoration to freedom. Author- 
 ship when the author is an artist is a terrible 
 tyranny, controlling, entrancing, enslaving; no 
 day, scarcely an hour, is free from bondage to the 
 idea of the conception shaping in the author's 
 brain ; the very sea and sky and all " the wild 
 benefit of nature " become but similes and illustra- 
 tions, seeming to exist but to point a paragraph 
 or aid the adornment of a tale. It is indeed a verit- 
 able House of Bondage. When the work in hand 
 is biography on a great scale, and Mr. Morley's 
 Life of Gladstone is biography on a great scale, 
 the tension is increased by the necessity of spend- 
 ing day after day of the biographer's own life 
 in the effort of re-living day by day the life of 
 another man, of illustrating his actions and of 
 diving or trying to dive into the secret recesses 
 of his breast to discover his motives. In such a 
 case as the one under consideration the work that 
 has been done was work worth doing, but for all 
 that, even the most ordinary biographer has his 
 
 1 The Life of William Ewari Gladstone. By John Morley. Three 
 volumes (Macmillan, 1903). From the Contemporary Review. 
 
 389
 
 390 GLADSTONE 
 
 own life to lead, his own place in the sun, his own 
 identity to serve, and that is why it is I obey the 
 impulse just mentioned and humbly proffer to 
 Mr. Morley my sincere congratulations upon com- 
 pleting a task which, as he humorously suggests, 
 there is no reason to believe could have been better 
 performed by Hercules himself. 
 
 When in May, 1720, Mr. Pope completed his 
 great translation of the Iliad which, whether it 
 be Homer or not, still holds the field against all 
 comers, the poet Gay, after the delightful and 
 friendly fashion of the time, circulated a copy of 
 verses, twenty-one stanzas of ottava rima, obviously, 
 says Mr. Courthope, imitated from the opening 
 of the forty-sixth canto of the Orlando Furioso, 
 in which he describes all the author's friends 
 coming in crowds to welcome him back from Troy. 
 
 Hail to the bard whom long as lost we mourned, 
 From siege, from battle and from storm returned. 
 
 The first of these agreeable stanzas runs as 
 follows : 
 
 Long hast thou, friend, been absent from thy soil, 
 Like patient Ithacus at siege of Troy; 
 I have been witness of thy six years' toil, 
 Thy daily labours and thy night's annoy. 
 Lost to thy native land with great turmoil : 
 Methinks with thee I've trod Sigaean ground 
 And heard the shores of Hellespont resound. 
 
 It is a pity we have no Parliamentary bard to 
 welcome Mr. Morley back to his place in the House 
 of Commons in lines as good as Gay's, which still 
 bubble with true feeling after the lapse of well-nigh 
 two centuries. 
 
 Mr. Morley 's Life of Gladstone is a big book as
 
 GLADSTONE 391 
 
 well as a long one. It is composed on a generous 
 scale. You can live in it comfortably for three 
 weeks, for it is not only full of matter, but of life 
 and literature. It is a roomy book, touching many 
 points and suggesting an infinity of thoughts. 
 There is philosophy in it, and passion, scholarship 
 and party feeling. 
 
 In Mr. Morley's literary portraits there is always 
 an effective, heart-stirring background. So it is 
 with the great Italian masters of painting, in whose 
 canvases we not only see the imposing figures in 
 the foreground, but behind them " the cold convent 
 spire " rising amidst the " sapphire mountains and 
 the golden sky." Mr. Morley never forgets to give 
 us a background suggestive of the far distances: 
 
 The world which was ere I was born, 
 The world which lasts when I am dead. 
 
 All of us can understand, almost to their full, 
 the words with which Mr. Morley opens out his 
 vast undertaking : 
 
 I am well aware that to try to write Mr. Gladstone's life 
 at all — the life of a man who held an imposing place in many- 
 high national transactions, whose character and career may 
 be regarded in such various lights, whose interests were so 
 manifold, whose years bridged so long a span of time — is a 
 stroke of temerity. To try to write his life to-day is to push 
 temerity still farther. 
 
 To ask the question. How has Mr. Morley done 
 his work, and to provide an answer by warmly 
 praising this bit, and more coldly commending 
 that other: 
 
 This likes me more, and this affects me less ; 
 by gently mixing blame with praise, acidulating
 
 392 GLADSTONE 
 
 your sweets so as to prove your good faith were 
 easily done; and would leave the reviewer's mind 
 at ease to grapple with the Life oj Giordano Bruno 
 or whatever else may be the title of the next book 
 on his table. 
 
 With the fates of books reviewers have small 
 concern. The greatest biography in our language 
 had a cool reception. One thing is, however, plain 
 enough — Mr. Morley has done his best to make 
 his man live, and move, and re-enact his strenuous 
 being, in these three volumes, and has brought 
 to bear upon his tremendous task not only great 
 and highly cultivated hterary gifts, and abundant 
 charm, born of books and meditative reading, 
 but a lofty spirit and a mellow wisdom. 
 
 A biographer who knew his great man in the 
 flesh is faced, though he may be unconscious of 
 it, with an initial difhculty. How is he to treat his 
 subject in relation to himself? An early copy of 
 Boswell's great book having found its way, in 
 May, 1 791, to Berkeley Square, where Horace 
 Walpole, cleverest of men, sat in the critic's arm- 
 chair, a letter was shortly dispatched to Miss 
 Berry containing the following passage : " Boswell 
 has at last published his ]ong-promised hfe of 
 Dr. Johnson in two volumes quarto. I will give 
 you an account of it when I have gone through it. 
 I have already perceived that, in writing the 
 history of Hudibras, Ralpho has not forgot himself." 
 Here is the difficulty referred to. The Boswellian 
 method is a great method if the biographer is, 
 and does not mind being, a Boswell, who was a 
 true artist if ever there was one. It is hard to 
 imagine anybody less hke Boswell than Mr. Morley,
 
 GLADSTONE 393 
 
 nor are the few pages in which he BosweUises so 
 far as to report the stray conversation of his hero, 
 the HveHest in his volumes. 
 
 In a matter of this kind it is not a question of 
 methods, but of men, and coming fresh from the 
 reading of this book I beheve that Boswell was not 
 better fitted by temperament to be the biographer 
 of the great Chieftain of Eighteenth Century Table 
 Talk than is Mr. Morley to be the biographer of 
 the great Chieftain of Nineteenth Century Parha- 
 mentary Life. 
 
 Mr. Morley has solved the personal difficulty 
 by keeping himself rigorously in the background 
 — an obscure hint at his own existence is the most 
 he allows himself. As a man we do not meet Mr. 
 Morley in the pages of his own book, but as a 
 temper, a spirit, a " wandering voice," he pervades 
 it from first to last. Not a chapter but bears his 
 signature at the close. It is all his. This is of the 
 essence of true authorship, of true biography as 
 distinguished from editorship and the collection 
 and correction of letters. No doubt cases may be 
 imagined, perhaps mentioned, where the person- 
 ality of the biographer, even though not offensively 
 obtruded, overshadows in interest the hfe story 
 of the man whose picture is being presented, and 
 where you read the text to illustrate the com- 
 mentary. Of course that is not the case here, for 
 though " the shaping spirit " of the biographer 
 has cut and carved every hne of his biography, 
 though his hand is visible everywhere, yet the 
 effect produced upon the reader is to leave him 
 alone with Mr. Gladstone. 
 
 Mr. Morley with commendable frankness refers
 
 394 GLADSTONE 
 
 to and seems to admit the force of the objection 
 that because he does not himself share what were 
 Mr. Gladstone's religious opinions and ecclesiastical 
 predilections, he was therefore as Mr. Gladstone's 
 biographer and quoad his religion at a serious dis- 
 advantage. Such an objection is both an aspersion 
 upon human nature and an insult to art. The object 
 of a biographer is to exhibit a character, not to 
 defend a creed. Readers, careful and deeply 
 interested readers to be counted by thousands, 
 will judge for themselves. For my part I do not 
 know where to find a book in general circulation 
 one-half so well calculated to excite proud and 
 joyful emotions in the breasts of good English 
 Churchmen of Mr. Gladstone's own way of think- 
 ing than Mr. Morley's Life. It was not for nothing 
 that Mr. Gladstone declared, after first meeting 
 his future biographer, that he could not help liking 
 him. If High Churchmen are not satisfied with 
 Mr. Morley's presentation, they must be, which 
 surely they are not, destitute alike of religious 
 emotion and literary instinct. For the first time 
 since the Revolution which brought Dutch William 
 to our shores, has the biographer of a British Prime 
 Minister had imposed upon him the task of pre- 
 senting to an indifferent world the spectacle of a 
 great secular statesman, who was also a devotee 
 of the Catholic claims of the Church of England; 
 one who believed that no more glorious Church 
 existed in Christendom, and who regarded its 
 " official ordering " as being " not any less, even 
 if it was not infinitely more important in the highest 
 interests of the nation than the construction of a 
 Cabinet or the appointment of permanent heads
 
 GLADSTONE 395 
 
 of departments." A novelty indeed to which Mr. 
 Morley has been able to do far more justice than 
 could possibly have been rendered by any ecclesi- 
 astic or devout layman of the same school of 
 thought. Mr. Gladstone's Life is a book for the 
 world, not for the seminary, and the faintest 
 trace in its composition of the Diocesan Anglican 
 Training College must have destroyed its Catho- 
 licity. The background of the biographer's own 
 grave outlook upon life, his ingrained intimacy 
 with the thoughts and emotions of the wise in all 
 ages, his sympathy with men's sad hearts, and 
 outstretched arms, create an ample ether in which 
 it is possible to read all over again about the 
 Gorham case without forgetting Mr. Gladstone's 
 own precept, with which Mr. Morley closes his last 
 volume, " that life is a great and noble calhng, 
 not a mean and grovelling thing." 
 
 That this part of Mr. Morley's task was difficult 
 may be admitted. The faintest touch of patronage, 
 of condescension to a weakness would have been 
 as odious as the easy confidence of the Diocesan 
 Training College; but what need is there even 
 to imagine such horrid things, none of which 
 are there ? 
 
 Turning to the book itself and viewing it as a 
 whole, we find it is a great and exciting drama that 
 Mr. Morley has arranged for the world's delectation. 
 Dramaturgist, rather than biographer, he should 
 be called. Madame de Stael once declared that 
 Napoleon was not a man but a system. Nobody 
 knew what the good woman meant, and remem- 
 bering Napoleon's hearty human detestation of 
 her, it cannot be doubted that she was talking
 
 396 GLADSTONE 
 
 nonsense, as indeed oracular persons usually do ; but 
 when Mr. Traill, seeking to describe the impression 
 produced upon the mind and the sight by Mr. 
 Gladstone in full Parliamentary action, declared 
 that he was not one man but " a phalanx of 
 assailants," the hyperbole is not too extravagant. 
 It is only saying, what was true enough, that you 
 can people a stage with Gladstones. Mr. Morley 
 more than once speaks of his great subject's 
 " dualism or more than duahsm." A hard team 
 to drive through three volumes, covering four- 
 score years. 
 
 But dilhculty is excitement; and I account 
 this book an exciting one. There is about it " a 
 hurry of the spirit," which carries the reader along 
 and makes him forget, in following the progress 
 of a great career, the unavoidable fact that its 
 main incidents have grown a little stale by frequent 
 narration. The biographer has crushed down the 
 narrator of events. We are thinking of Gladstone 
 all through, and not of Ireland or Bulgaria or the 
 Income Tax. The history we are for the moment 
 interested in is not the history of a country but of 
 a mind and a character. The mind is at the 
 beginning slow moving, almost hide-bound, quick 
 to obey the lash of authority, seemingly proud to 
 wear the harness of old tradition. There was nothing 
 of the rebel about the youthful Gladstone. He 
 believed what he was told, and took his Toryism 
 for granted. Old Sir Timothy Shelley would have 
 been proud indeed to have begotten William 
 Ewart, instead of Percy Bysshe. Slowly, almost 
 provokingly slowly, the mind begins to move 
 in an orbit of its own, under influences hard
 
 GLADSTONE 397 
 
 to ascertain. When, for example, did the un- 
 questioned Evangehcahsm of the Liverpool and 
 Seaforth homes begin to change its hues ? From 
 whom did he first learn " Church Principles " ? Who 
 lit the fires of his fervent Anghcanism ? When 
 did there creep into his mental constitution that 
 conception of hberty as a thing precious beyond 
 price ? We can from reading Mr. Morley's Life 
 guess at the answers to some of these questions. 
 
 As time goes on, and change either of view or 
 point of view takes place, we see the mind of this 
 remarkable man gaining a momentum, gathering 
 a force — ominous of much — until at last it cul- 
 minates in the prodigious effort of 1886, when the 
 seeming revolution is complete. The mystery that 
 hangs over the early changes does not attach to 
 those of his middle and later life. We can see these 
 at work for ourselves, and hardly need Mr. Glad- 
 stone's own copious annotations upon them. 
 Linked with this restless and ever active mind was 
 a character which probably underwent small 
 change. Men's circumstances change, seldom 
 their characters. Mr. Gladstone's character, no 
 less than his mind, stands revealed in this bio- 
 graphy. His severest critic, if a student of human 
 nature at all, must admit that Mr. Gladstone had 
 plenty of character. What were its dominant notes 
 it might be hard to say. The union, the marriage 
 of such a mind as Mr. Gladstone's with such a 
 character as his, could not but produce a fascinating 
 result, and when you add to this the circumstance 
 that the theatre on which he energised was the 
 House of Commons, that politics were his supreme 
 occupation, that he was four times Prime Minister,
 
 398 GLADSTONE 
 
 it is no wonder that his life written by Mr. Morley 
 should be exciting. 
 
 Piquancy is included in the situation by the 
 fact that Mr. Disraeli should have been his great 
 opponent. Two men more out of the common, 
 harder for the plain man to unravel, cannot well be 
 imagined. One is not usually sorry for the British 
 public on whose broad back Prime Ministers and 
 Cabinets impose huge burdens, spending its money 
 and spilling its blood with perfect composure, 
 without loss of self-respect or public esteem, but 
 it ought to be in our hearts to pity it for having 
 so long a time to make up its mind between Glad- 
 stone and Disraeli. The one was a marvel and the 
 other a mystery. The heads of both men were 
 charged with ideas wholly alien to the common 
 modes of thought of the British householder, 
 whether he compounded for his rates or paid them 
 himself. Browning in his darkest mood was not 
 more puzzling. At last an understanding of some 
 sort was arrived at in both cases, but it took a long 
 time. What a pity it is we have not a Life of the 
 mystery-man on the same generous scale, composed 
 by an intelligence as searching and in a spirit as 
 sympathetically philosophical as we now have of 
 the marvellous man.^ 
 
 It can safely be said that Mr. Morley has 
 triumphed over what in scholastic language may 
 be called the accidental difficulties that beset his 
 path. The religious difficulty, the historical diffi- 
 culty, the personal difficulty have all been con- 
 quered. The book's method, tone, temper, and 
 background are hardly capable of improvement. 
 
 ' There is now a Life of the mystery-man in six volumes.
 
 GLADSTONE 399 
 
 The substantial difficulty, which hes in the path 
 of all biographers, that of making their man com- 
 prehensible and permanently interesting, a real 
 figure and not merely the oftest repeated name, 
 whether this also has been overcome is a question 
 the friendliest of reviewers, even were he at the 
 same time the most competent, cannot answer 
 within a fortnight of the date of publication. 
 
 In trying to fix the eye exclusively upon the 
 great subject of Mr. Morley's biography as he is 
 presented to the world in its pages, the complexity 
 of Mr. Gladstone's mind, as distinguished from 
 his character, becomes clearly revealed. He was, 
 or at all events he became in course of time, a great 
 Reformer. On how many banners have the words 
 " Gladstone and Reform " been inscribed in golden 
 letters ! Yet he had not, save in the region of civil 
 administration and finance — a notable exception, 
 no doubt — the Reformer's temperament. He had 
 the theologian's temperament, not the humani- 
 tarian's. The institution of slavery, brought close 
 home to him though it was, never shook his soul as 
 it had done Clarkson's. Yet perhaps if his shrewd 
 father, always alive to dangerous possibilities 
 lurking in his son's nature, had not peremptorily 
 forbidden a visit to Jamacia it may well be that 
 Mr. Gladstone's hidden fires of Liberalism would 
 have burst into flame thirty years earlier than they 
 did. The sights that made " Monk " Lewis hberate 
 his slaves in the West Indies, and wrung the heart 
 of Mrs. Kemble on her husband's Georgian planta- 
 tion, could hardly have left Mr. Gladstone quite 
 unmoved. Still his coolness on the subject is as 
 noticeable as Cardinal Newman's about temperance.
 
 400 GLADSTONE 
 
 Nor did the horrors of war, the trenches of Sebas- 
 topol, ever cause his blood to forsake his cheeks. 
 Given a good cause, a good argumentative cause, 
 hke the maintenance of the pubhc law of Europe, 
 and Mr. Gladstone was always ready to defend 
 the appeal to armed force, and he could see men 
 arrayed for mutual slaughter with a theologian's 
 grim composure. 
 
 However much you may detest war — and you cannot 
 detest it too much — there is no war, except one, the war for 
 hberty, that does not contain in it elements of corruption, as 
 well as of misery, that are deplorable to recollect and to 
 consider; but however deplorable wars may be, they are 
 among the necessities of our condition, and there are times 
 when justice, when faith, when the welfare of mankind 
 require a man not to shrink from the responsibility of under- 
 taking them. And if you undertake war, so also you are often 
 obliged to undertake measures that may lead to war 
 (vol. iii. p. 182). 
 
 The truth of these remarks lies in the application 
 of them. Justice, faith, the welfare of mankind 
 are easily invoked by angry men. 
 
 Nor did old-world abuses, apart from bad taxes, 
 easily arouse Mr. Gladstone's anger. He had a 
 great slice of the eighteenth century in his large 
 composition. He once told me a horrible story of 
 the scenes that were to be witnessed at the hustings 
 in Scotland in the old times he remembered so 
 well. It was, it seems, the habit of the electors 
 on those occasions to spit at the one or other of 
 the candidates they least affected, with such 
 fervour and persistency that before the proceed- 
 ings were ended both these unfortunate men were 
 covered with saliva from head to heel. Being then 
 a Scottish member this barbarous narrative nearly 
 turned my stomach, but Mr. Gladstone's eyes
 
 GLADSTONE 401 
 
 gleamed with Hogarthian merriment as he went 
 on to say that at last barriers were put up before 
 the edge of the hustings, just beyond a nicely 
 calculated " spitting distance." I am not sure he 
 did not regard the erection of these barriers as 
 an unworthy concession; and certainly when 
 I expressed joy at the abolition of the hustings 
 altogether, he vehemently demurred and mourned 
 their disappearance like a lover! The fact is he was 
 naturally against any change. Though he dis- 
 established a Church and threatened the Union, 
 he fought his Cabinet like a Trojan against the 
 removal of the Duke of Wellington's statue from 
 Hyde Park Corner (vol. iii. p. 5). He belonged, 
 as Mr. Morley was not Hkely to forget to remind 
 us, to the Turgot-like order of mind, and it 
 was "a wildish destiny " that made him, against 
 his wish, though not against his will, the pro- 
 pounder, though certainly not the author, of the 
 Newcastle Programme. 
 
 This perpetual contrast — brought out so clearly 
 by his biographer — between Mr. Gladstone's tem- 
 perament and the work he did with such superlative 
 energy as a Reformer, produces a strange effect 
 upon the mind of the reader. It adds perhaps to 
 the excitement, but it is puzzhng, and puzzles 
 often tease. 
 
 Among Mr. Gladstone's many shining quahties, 
 flashes of insight into the hidden causes of things 
 cannot be numbered. Bright, Cobden, DisraeH 
 saw things long before he did, sometimes, particu- 
 larly in Disraeh's case, by a happy, careless, irre- 
 sponsible intuition, sometimes because their minds 
 were not encumbered with irrelevant matter or 
 
 2C
 
 40 2 
 
 GLADSTONE 
 
 their judgments biassed by irrelevant considera- 
 tions. There are short cuts to truth, but Mr. 
 Gladstone never took any of them. His mind 
 marched like a great army with a heap of impedi- 
 menta, but when it came up it was in full fighting 
 order. It is melancholy to discover from this 
 Life how often Mr. Gladstone got his best advice, 
 not from his colleagues in the Cabinet, but from 
 rank outsiders. I must not, however, here raise 
 the question of government by Cabinet, but 
 whenever next that question is raised, this book of 
 Mr. Morley's will he open before the disputants. 
 
 But though Mr. Gladstone may not have had 
 the Reformer's temperament, and may have lacked 
 the illuminative insight of Burke, the natural 
 hberality of mind of Fox, the quick wit of Disraeli, 
 and the cynical but useful determination to strip 
 facts to the bone so characteristic of the late Lord 
 Sahsbury, Mr. Morley makes us see that Mr. 
 Gladstone had something not one of the great 
 or remarkable men just named possessed, at all 
 events in any noticeable measure, and that some- 
 thing was a great and soul-animating ideal of a 
 sisterhood of nations all acknowledging the yoke 
 of the same Pubhc Law. Himself a fervent Cathohc 
 Christian, his dream was that this Public Law, 
 though not limited by the boundaries of Christen- 
 dom, should be founded upon and administered 
 in the spirit of true rehgion. Mr. Morley quotes 
 his exclamation in 1879: "Remember that the 
 sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, 
 among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye 
 of Almighty God as can be your own. Remember 
 that He who has united you as human beings in
 
 GLADSTONE 403 
 
 the same flesh and blood has bound you by the 
 law of mutual love; then that mutual love is not 
 limited by the boundaries of Christian civilisation; 
 but it passes over the whole surface of the earth 
 and embraces the meanest along with the greatest 
 in its unmeasured scope " (vol. ii. p. 595)- Never 
 before has England had a Prime Minister who could 
 have used such language as this, expecting it to 
 be believed, and it is quite hkely she may never 
 have one again. 
 
 On the same page Mr. Morley enumicrates the 
 six principles Mr. Gladstone thought to be the 
 right ones for us : " To foster the strength of the 
 Empire by just laws and by economy; to seek to 
 preserve the world's peace; to strive to the utter- 
 most to cultivate and maintain the principle of 
 concert in Europe; to avoid needless and entang- 
 hng engagements; to inspire our foreign poHcy 
 with the love of freedom; to acknowledge the 
 equal right of all nations." Not a word about 
 Empire! Indeed Mr. Morley hastens to remind 
 us that Mr. Gladstone held up as fundamentally 
 unsound and practically ruinous the revival of 
 the analogy of Imperial Rome for the guidance of 
 British policy. 
 
 The secret of Mr. Gladstone's leadership was his 
 ideahsm. His finance earned him the respect of 
 all men, his ideahsm secured him the devotion for 
 a time of a majority. 
 
 Creeds pass, rites change, no altar standeth whole. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone's ideahsm, which was founded upon 
 Christianity, has been succeeded by an idealism 
 which is founded on Empire. Whether the idea
 
 404 GLADSTONE 
 
 of Empire is strong enough to bear the tremendous 
 strain that must fall upon it may be doubted. 
 " Do not attempt by philosophy," wrote Dr. 
 Newman, " what once was done by rehgion." 
 To convert patriotism on an Imperial scale into 
 a religion is an effort now being made which is 
 not without an idealism of its own, but it too 
 will pass. 
 
 It has been too much the fashion of late years 
 to speak disparagingly of Mr. Gladstone's oratory. 
 Mr. Morley's book will, I think, tend to restore 
 it to its true level. Although necessarily sparing 
 of quotation, the biographer has been able to give 
 a sufficient number of extracts from Mr. Glad- 
 stone's speeches to make good his title to rank 
 with the greatest of our orators. Truly does Mr. 
 Morley say " political oratory is action, not words 
 — action, character, will, conviction, purpose, per- 
 sonahty " (vol. iii. p. 312). These are hard things 
 to transmit from one age to another! Mr. Morley 
 has certainly no disposition to exaggerate the 
 charms of printed speeches, but there is a charm 
 about a really great speech on a great subject not 
 to be found in any other mode of expression, and 
 this charm, fugitive as it usually is, does occasionally 
 cling through the centuries. There are at least 
 a dozen of Mr. Gladstone's speeches which may 
 confidently be expected to defy time. There is a 
 favourite parliamentary phrase often in the mouth 
 of the Leader for the time being of the House 
 when he wishes to be kind or civil, about " raising 
 the tone of our debates." Mr. Gladstone was from 
 the very first a famous hand at this exploit. The 
 number of debates which had their tone raised
 
 GLADSTONE 405 
 
 by him is beyond enumeration. The best example 
 of all is recorded with pride and spirit by Mr. 
 Morley. The Bradlaugh case exhibits the House 
 of Commons at its very worst and Mr. Gladstone 
 at his best. He glorified the House's shame, and 
 his great speech dehvered on the 26th of April, 
 1883, read as it will be with pride so long as Enghsh- 
 men honour rehgion and delight in justice, makes 
 amends for the orgy of impiety, stupidity and 
 party malice which called it forth. 
 
 I did not mention " party spirit " as one of Mr. 
 Morley's accidental difficulties because I cannot 
 suppose it ever was one. Had Mr. Morley, in com- 
 posing his third volume, pretended to be impartial 
 in the sense of being indifferent as a good judge 
 is indifferent to the parties who appear before 
 him as litigants, nobody would have believed him. 
 He is an honest chronicler of the Home Rule move- 
 ment as he witnessed it. 
 
 The Home Rule controversy is now history. 
 The Party that it called into being has after a 
 remarkable record split on another and a more 
 important issue. The Land Question has passed 
 through many phases, and we are now pledged 
 to the extradition of the loyal garrison and the 
 creation of a peasant proprietary. That a large 
 measure of Home Rule will follow is as certain 
 as anything can be in a world like this. These 
 commonplace considerations have robbed the 
 controversy for young people of the sound and 
 fury that accompanied its birth and progress. 
 
 One fault I will hint to prove my good faith. 
 In a book built for all time it is a mistake not to 
 name names. Mr. Morley shies at a name. There
 
 4o6 GLADSTONE 
 
 is an index at the end of the third volume, but you 
 may search it in vain for Richard Pigott, nor is 
 the index-maker to blame, for Mr. Morley, though 
 he tells the tale of the forged letters and the 
 Parnell Commission with infinite spirit, matchless 
 terseness, and the utmost plainness of speech, 
 manages to do so without identifying by name 
 " the broken-down Irish journahst," " the un- 
 fortunate sinner," " the abject fellow-creature," 
 who fled from the witness-box to blow out his 
 brains in Madrid. But without the name the tale 
 is incomplete, and thousands will read the story 
 for the first time in Mr. Morley's book. 
 
 I will give another and more agreeable instance. 
 It is surely a shame to rob good Mr. Greene, the 
 Tory member — usually silent, and now for ever 
 silenced — for Bury St. Edmunds, of the glory of 
 having told during the Ewelme Rectory Debate 
 one of the wittiest and most apposite stories ever 
 recounted to a delighted House. The story may 
 be read in the second volume (p. 387), but Mr. 
 Greene is shoved away into the perpetual obscurity 
 of " a worthy member." It is one of the charms 
 of the House of Commons that the best things 
 said in it have usually been uttered by its least- 
 known members. 
 
 On laying down such a biography as this, a simple, 
 natural question rises to one's lips. We now know 
 a great deal more than we knew before, we have 
 been admitted to the inner if not the innermost 
 sanctuaries of being — what effect has been pro- 
 duced upon our affections ? I can only express 
 my own belief that this book will make the memory 
 of Mr. Gladstone dear to generations of students.
 
 GLADSTONE 407 
 
 Mr. Gladstone was a very vulnerable man. Dr. 
 Johnson, who declared Reynolds to be invulner- 
 able, would have had no difficulty in abusing 
 Mr. Gladstone had he been so minded, and ever 
 enjoyed the opportunity. Mr. Morley candidly 
 admits that his great " biographee " had some 
 irritating ways and often failed to create a satis- 
 factory impression upon plain-saihng men. His 
 broad shoulders were made to bear the brunt 
 of untoward events for which colleagues who 
 have since ridden off to seek their own fortunes 
 in far other fields were more to blame than he. 
 His lofty ideahsm offended the " man of the 
 world." He was never in harmony " with the 
 ideas and temper of the day, especially as they 
 are represented in London." Although one of 
 the great forces of his age, he was not re- 
 presentative of its spirit. He had therefore 
 many enemies scattered up and down the world. 
 He had injured the Empire, so it was said. He 
 was accused of having given up the Ionian 
 Islands, of forsaking Gordon and leaving Majuba 
 unavenged. He was, it was declared, no friend 
 of the flag, and unable to appreciate the Colonies. 
 His enthusiasms were misplaced and his energies 
 misdirected. A little less Homer and more 
 Kipling, less love of economy and more of Empire, 
 would, in the opinion of many, have been an ad- 
 vantageous exchange. But now the great man 
 has gone and left his country to its fate it will 
 be easier for all to do him justice, and, as I have 
 already said, my belief is that Mr. Morley's 
 pious labour will make many friends for Mr. 
 Gladstone's memory.
 
 4o8 GLADSTONE 
 
 It is a noble life that is here recorded, the life 
 of a spirit. Man, as well as God, is a spirit: 
 
 For tho' the Giant Ages heave the hill 
 
 And break the shore and evermore 
 
 Make and break, and work their will ; 
 
 Tho' worlds on worlds in myriad myriads roll 
 
 Round us, each with different powers, 
 
 And other forms of life than ours, 
 
 WTiat know we greater than the soul ? 
 
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